Friday, February 9, 2018
Tuesday, May 24, 2016
"BOAT-SCHOOLING:" An education I wouldn't trade
All I remember of my formal education is the humiliation. Having to cover two chalkboards with the word "luncheon" because the teacher said I'd spelled it wrong on a quiz, when I hadn't. Having to ride my bike home during class, blinded with tears, to get the arithmetic book I'd forgotten.
Being openly rebuked in high school for whispering to a friend--by the very teacher we both had a crush on and were whispering about. Being accused of false modesty because I was too embarrassed to read a personal composition aloud in front of my classmates--and having the teacher read it to them herself.
Apart from that, I have only two memories of school. I felt smug as a second grader because I learned how to spell bicycle from overhearing a fourth grader spell it (all grades were in the same room) and I remember taking a telephone receiver apart in ninth grade science. (I don't remember whether we put it back together.)
That's it. That was my formal education through high school. I accidentally learned how to spell bicycle and I took a telephone apart.
Actually, I have to confess, my formal education was sketchy. I was mostly home schooled, although 30 years ago we didn't know it had a name. I was in the middle of second grade when we moved from Ohio to Japan and the one-room school I attended was on an Australian-American Army base outside Hiroshima. I was ten when my dad finished designing and building the yacht which was to become our home for the next ten years.
Once we started sailing around the world, I wasn't in a formal classroom for more than a week (although I did take some Calvert classes by correspondence) until the tail end of junior high in Honolulu. I completed eleventh grade and then we sailed back to Japan and I never got around to doing the assignments that were supposed to enable me to graduate.
In short, I have three college degrees and am working on a fourth, but I don't have a high school diploma. [I can identify with college graduates and high school drop-outs. All things to all men, right, Apostle Paul?] It feels very strange, with our daughter a senior in high school, to be helping make decisions about class rings and yearbook photos and graduation invitations.
I wish I could give both our children the enriching experiences my parents gave me. During the years that I was home schooled, I got an education I wouldn't trade for four years at Oxford.
My brother Ted taught me math as we criss-crossed the storm-tossed Pacific. He made up word problems like "If two porpoises are swimming 23 knots [nautical miles per hour] north-by-northwest and a killer whale with its baby are swimming 16 knots south-by-southeast. . ." My mother taught me spelling and punctuation by having me keep a daily journal. I still do, though no one corrects it and gives me a grade anymore. Our whole family read encyclopedia articles on the geography and history of whatever island or continent we were approaching at the time.
There were certainly gaps in my education. I didn't pick up algebra, poli sci and economics until years later, out of my kids' textbooks. I had only the haziest idea of the geography and history of my own country; I remember picturing the west coast of the United States as a smooth curve and wondering where the Golden Gate went--parallel to the coast or from the coast into the sea?
There were other disadvantages to being home schooled on the high seas. I missed hamburgers and apple pie and salivated over ads for Cheez Whiz. I was lonely. We were never anywhere long enough for me to get past the feeling that I was this week's "show and tell" item--"She's sailing around the world on a yacht!" Later, I had a difficult adjustment socially.
What did I gain? I became best friends with my mother, father, and brother. (My other brother Tim was in college during the time we were sailing; we became close later, when we were both adults.) I learned a smattering of a dozen languages. I learned to like curry and sushi and poi [if it's banana poi. Seriously.].
I learned to catch colorful tropical fish (though they were poisonous, therefore inedible) with bananas and albatrosses with breadcrumbs. We were so close to a volcano in Hawaii that Ted got his eyebrows singed off. In the Indian Ocean we rode out a typhoon. On Bali we watched an Indonesian teenager have her incisors filed flat in a coming-of-age ceremony. And, in a hair-raising festival, I heard men and women shriek as demons possessed them.
I learned the names of the stars we navigated by. (I liked the name Zubenelgenubi best; years after our trip my mother named a dog Zubenelgenubi, Nubi for short.) I learned to steer with a tiller and climb the mast.
I patted a lion cub, stroked an iguana and held a kiwi bird and a hedgehog (not at the same time). I helped raise a Galapagos tortoise. Ted and I chased a seal across an otherwise deserted beach in the Galapagos. I rode a bucking yacht through the Panama Canal.
I saw where Napoleon was exiled and where Captain Cook was murdered.
By the time we reached Durban, South Africa, I didn't find it odd to see barefoot women in the city, with pegs in their earlobes and red clay forming their hair into beehives. I learned firsthand about apartheid: which bus benches were our Japanese crewmen supposed to sit on, the one for "Europeans only" or for "non-Europeans"? No matter where they sat, someone from that group would tell them they didn't belong there.
We arrived back in Honolulu and I entered high school. I found kids my age shallow and their concerns petty. Incessant talk of "crinolines" (the stiff petticoats of the 50's that made "poodle skirts" stick out all around) and pimples and the prom bored me. I had already seen the world and part of my journal was in the process of being published as a book. Before the year was out, I would be leaving school for a new kind of voyage.
During our sabbatical from classrooms, Ted and I had bonded with our parents to such a degree that when they decided to sail into the Pacific nuclear testing zone as a protest in 1958, we insisted on going, too. Their values had become our values, their cause our cause, their vision our vision.
None of us were Christians then. Now, as a parent, I want my own children to share our Christian values and cause and vision. How can they, I wonder, unless they are close enough to us to watch our lives and feel our heart?
Much as I long to, I can't give my children the childhood I had. I can't take them out of school to give them an education. I can't even get them to watch history being made on TV--the Challenger disaster, the Contra controversy, the Souter debates and the Persian Gulf crisis. They're too busy studying old history, out of textbooks.
I'm very grateful for the Christian schools they attend. But as a parent, I feel deprived, cut out of the process. And somehow, when I picture my children having to spend six hours a day sitting in chairs and listening to someone talk, month after month for 13 years, it's almost more than I can bear.
(First published in Home Education Magazine, May-June, 1991--some notes added later.)
Being openly rebuked in high school for whispering to a friend--by the very teacher we both had a crush on and were whispering about. Being accused of false modesty because I was too embarrassed to read a personal composition aloud in front of my classmates--and having the teacher read it to them herself.
Apart from that, I have only two memories of school. I felt smug as a second grader because I learned how to spell bicycle from overhearing a fourth grader spell it (all grades were in the same room) and I remember taking a telephone receiver apart in ninth grade science. (I don't remember whether we put it back together.)
That's it. That was my formal education through high school. I accidentally learned how to spell bicycle and I took a telephone apart.
Actually, I have to confess, my formal education was sketchy. I was mostly home schooled, although 30 years ago we didn't know it had a name. I was in the middle of second grade when we moved from Ohio to Japan and the one-room school I attended was on an Australian-American Army base outside Hiroshima. I was ten when my dad finished designing and building the yacht which was to become our home for the next ten years.
Once we started sailing around the world, I wasn't in a formal classroom for more than a week (although I did take some Calvert classes by correspondence) until the tail end of junior high in Honolulu. I completed eleventh grade and then we sailed back to Japan and I never got around to doing the assignments that were supposed to enable me to graduate.
In short, I have three college degrees and am working on a fourth, but I don't have a high school diploma. [I can identify with college graduates and high school drop-outs. All things to all men, right, Apostle Paul?] It feels very strange, with our daughter a senior in high school, to be helping make decisions about class rings and yearbook photos and graduation invitations.
I wish I could give both our children the enriching experiences my parents gave me. During the years that I was home schooled, I got an education I wouldn't trade for four years at Oxford.
My brother Ted taught me math as we criss-crossed the storm-tossed Pacific. He made up word problems like "If two porpoises are swimming 23 knots [nautical miles per hour] north-by-northwest and a killer whale with its baby are swimming 16 knots south-by-southeast. . ." My mother taught me spelling and punctuation by having me keep a daily journal. I still do, though no one corrects it and gives me a grade anymore. Our whole family read encyclopedia articles on the geography and history of whatever island or continent we were approaching at the time.
There were certainly gaps in my education. I didn't pick up algebra, poli sci and economics until years later, out of my kids' textbooks. I had only the haziest idea of the geography and history of my own country; I remember picturing the west coast of the United States as a smooth curve and wondering where the Golden Gate went--parallel to the coast or from the coast into the sea?
There were other disadvantages to being home schooled on the high seas. I missed hamburgers and apple pie and salivated over ads for Cheez Whiz. I was lonely. We were never anywhere long enough for me to get past the feeling that I was this week's "show and tell" item--"She's sailing around the world on a yacht!" Later, I had a difficult adjustment socially.
What did I gain? I became best friends with my mother, father, and brother. (My other brother Tim was in college during the time we were sailing; we became close later, when we were both adults.) I learned a smattering of a dozen languages. I learned to like curry and sushi and poi [if it's banana poi. Seriously.].
I learned to catch colorful tropical fish (though they were poisonous, therefore inedible) with bananas and albatrosses with breadcrumbs. We were so close to a volcano in Hawaii that Ted got his eyebrows singed off. In the Indian Ocean we rode out a typhoon. On Bali we watched an Indonesian teenager have her incisors filed flat in a coming-of-age ceremony. And, in a hair-raising festival, I heard men and women shriek as demons possessed them.
I learned the names of the stars we navigated by. (I liked the name Zubenelgenubi best; years after our trip my mother named a dog Zubenelgenubi, Nubi for short.) I learned to steer with a tiller and climb the mast.
I patted a lion cub, stroked an iguana and held a kiwi bird and a hedgehog (not at the same time). I helped raise a Galapagos tortoise. Ted and I chased a seal across an otherwise deserted beach in the Galapagos. I rode a bucking yacht through the Panama Canal.
I saw where Napoleon was exiled and where Captain Cook was murdered.
By the time we reached Durban, South Africa, I didn't find it odd to see barefoot women in the city, with pegs in their earlobes and red clay forming their hair into beehives. I learned firsthand about apartheid: which bus benches were our Japanese crewmen supposed to sit on, the one for "Europeans only" or for "non-Europeans"? No matter where they sat, someone from that group would tell them they didn't belong there.
We arrived back in Honolulu and I entered high school. I found kids my age shallow and their concerns petty. Incessant talk of "crinolines" (the stiff petticoats of the 50's that made "poodle skirts" stick out all around) and pimples and the prom bored me. I had already seen the world and part of my journal was in the process of being published as a book. Before the year was out, I would be leaving school for a new kind of voyage.
During our sabbatical from classrooms, Ted and I had bonded with our parents to such a degree that when they decided to sail into the Pacific nuclear testing zone as a protest in 1958, we insisted on going, too. Their values had become our values, their cause our cause, their vision our vision.
None of us were Christians then. Now, as a parent, I want my own children to share our Christian values and cause and vision. How can they, I wonder, unless they are close enough to us to watch our lives and feel our heart?
Much as I long to, I can't give my children the childhood I had. I can't take them out of school to give them an education. I can't even get them to watch history being made on TV--the Challenger disaster, the Contra controversy, the Souter debates and the Persian Gulf crisis. They're too busy studying old history, out of textbooks.
I'm very grateful for the Christian schools they attend. But as a parent, I feel deprived, cut out of the process. And somehow, when I picture my children having to spend six hours a day sitting in chairs and listening to someone talk, month after month for 13 years, it's almost more than I can bear.
(First published in Home Education Magazine, May-June, 1991--some notes added later.)
Tuesday, March 22, 2016
EARLE REYNOLDS: My dad grew up in a circus (1st of 3)
Dad was not only a physical anthropologist, playwright, yacht designer and captain, tri-state tennis champion, peace activist and a felon. He was also, at one time, a trapeze artist.
In his 80's, when dementia had stripped him of most of his memory, Skipper could still remember building a boat and sailing it around the world. Until the dementia he could also remember growing up in the circus.
He was born Earl Frederick Schoene on October 18, 1910 as the circus passed through Des Moines, Iowa. His parents and Uncle Frederick were trapeze artists and tightrope walkers.
As a child, I loved hearing him tell of "sleeping in a wardrobe trunk," on the lid of which he remembered were pasted the pictures of his "best friends: the fat lady, the man with no arms and the Wild Man of Borneo." He said he cut his teeth on the corner of a resin box.
They moved constantly, always staying in the best hotels, eating in the most exclusive restaurants, wearing expensive clothes--for show; expenditures always kept pace with their earnings. Before he could read, his parents would tuck the name of the hotel into his pocket and let him roam all over whatever the city they were in by himself. He remembered one day when he had walked himself to exhaustion and, as instructed, found a cab and handed the driver the card. With a flourish, the driver bowed and opened the back door for him. He drove slowly around the corner and stopped, then got out and opened Earle's door for him. Earle had been only half a block from his hotel.
Once he rounded up all the local boys--newsboys, shoeshine boys, street kids--and brought them back to the hotel dining room for breakfast, charging his parent's room. Just once.
He remembered as a toddler singing "Over There," the sentimental song of the Great War, for crowds and having people throw him pennies; on rare occasions I could get him to sing it for me. His version was "He climbs upstairs in his unnerwears" (instead of "all unawares"); please tell my daddy to COME home. Just a baby's prayer at twilight for his DADDY over there."
After eighty years, he still resented the memory of a "piddly little girl" who walked up and stood on her head once while he was singing. His parents made him split his earnings with her "and all she did was stand on her head. Anybody can stand on their head!"
In his unpublished (and unpolished) eight-page memoir, Penny Arcade, Earle described his experience in the circus in the third person. (He didn't actually change his name from Earl to Earle until he was adopted by his stepfather, Louis Reynolds, Then he changed it to Earle Landry Reynolds.) Here's part of his memoir:
Circus Day
Even before the sun had entirely chased away the shadows on the lot, scurrying strikers had pitched the most important tent--the cook tent. Here, while the busy workers set up the big top and the menagerie, preparations were in progress for breakfast. The heavenly odor of frying bacon, the sound of the pounding tent-pegs, and the confusion caused by urchins quarreling over the honor of watering the elephants, all rose on high in an indescribably conglomeration. Seeming chaos reigned.
But this confusion was only outward. In a miraculously short time, the empty, barren lot was transformed into a billowing sea of canvas. [Foreshadowing the billowing canvas which would be raised hand over hand up the masts of the Phoenix? JR] By early afternoon all was in readiness: The animals were groomed, the red and gold wagons glistened, the clowns were in full regalia, the parade commenced, augmented by the entire juvenile population.
What heaven this was to a boy! What seven times seventh heaven it was to a boy who, not once or twice a year, but daily, enjoyed this unsurpassed splendor! Earle reveled in it. The thrill of actually sleeping in a special train, with yard-high scarlet letters on each side; the excitement of arriving in a new town in the small hours of the morning; the never-ending pride of being the center of an admiring and envious group of town boys--all the joys conspired to keep the youngster happy and content.
He was all over the circus lot each night, and on the inside of every gimmick and con-game ever devised to extract money from honest people's pockets. For in those days it was not even expected that the games and chances offered to the suckers should be on the level. Not a single concession but had its pet method of bamboozling the rubes.
Earle's occupation around the age of five was an exalted position as howler in the den of the Wild Man of Borneo. The word describes the work. With a well-resined string, a tin can, a glove, and plenty of energy, he howled. . . Meanwhile, the dimes rolled in.
Earle had two unavoidable duties. First, he must every day study with his mother, both in secular subjects and in his religion (Catholicism). Even while their life stretched out as a succession of one-night stands in one-horse towns, she planned far ahead for her boy. He learned to read, and, far more important, he learned to love to read. . .
His second duty was indeed no duty, but an unalloyed pleasure. One hour each day he spent on his own miniature trapeze, hung a few feet from the ground. Here he practiced hanging from his heels, "skinning the cat," and all the other bone-cracking acrobatic delights known to boyhood.
His one aim, contrary to the intentions of most boys, was to follow in his father's tracks--but then, most boys' fathers are not trapeze performers! Earle's greatest delight was to be carried aloft with his parents during rehearsal, and, securely strapped to a swinging bar, watch the ground move swiftly underneath.
To be continued
Monday, March 21, 2016
EARLE REYNOLDS: My dad grew up in a circus (2nd of 3)
The Schoenes, signing a new contract, now went back into vaudeville. Earle once more was forced to leave his beloved circus, this time for good. Again came the regular succession of theater after theater, of hotel instead of tent, of city instead of town, of solitude instead of the companionship of the show-kids. The game had lost its glamor for him.
On the same bill with the Schoenes one season was a quiet little Englishman whose act included grotesque impersonations and comic tumbling. A perfectly nice young fellow, thought the Schoenes, except for his ridiculous interest in some new fad in the theatrical profession, a flickering shadow-box affair, calling moving-pictures.
Of course any professional entertainer could tell you that the dim, jerky figures moving drunkenly across a wavering screen could never supplant the popularity of the established show-world; but they could not tell the serious little Englishman. He seemed strangely confident, so confident in fact that he planned to leave the bill at the end of the season, and sink all his money into a foolhardy attempt to actually make an acceptable picture-play of full length.
His plot, centering on the life of a tramp, required the use of a juvenile lead, and he offered the part to Earle. However, the youngster was now taking part in the regular act, and the Schoenes did not feel it worth their while to disrupt a signed contract for some fly-by-night scheme. They turned the offer down.
At the end of the season, the pantomimist left the show, and went to California.
In the next year, the Schoenes sat in a darkened theater, as did thousands of other skeptical people throughout the country, and viewed, with the sound of their own distant doom in their ears, the first attempt of their fellow-actor of the former season. Outside the theater was emblazoned in electric lights the title of the picture: SHOWING THIS WEEK ONLY
CHARLIE CHAPLIN
IN
THE KID
WITH
JACKIE COOGAN
For two years more the routine of three-a-day went on. Earle was now billed separately, as a juvenile singer, and drew each Saturday night, with pardonable pride, a tidy check from the box office. He seemed destined for a theatrical career, and quite probably his future would have gradually merged into a settled decision to enter permanently into show-business. But this was not to be.
War broke out; all plans were upset; William enlisted, and the Landre Troupe again broke up, this time forever. William was detailed to the South, as an acrobat! Not even in the stress of war-time could he escape his career. The Schoenes now turned entertainers--for khaki spectators. From training camp to training camp they went, from Texas to Carolina, giving free exhibitions for soldiers, and operating a shooting-gallery. Earle still sang and practiced faithfully on his own trapeze. . .
William had perfected an entirely new type of performance. He had evolved an unrivaled trick, inverted walking. This consisted of walking head-downward, supported only by the strength of the toes, which were thrust into little U-shaped loops. At that time, it was an absolutely novel act in the field of entertainment, and he won wide acclaim. His new program consisted almost wholly of variations of this trick, and for his trapeze he substituted a long looped apparatus, which he hung between office buildings.
Now William played only cities; voluntary contributions were collected among the thousands who crowded the down-town streets to see the feat; the proceeds went to the Red Cross.
In August, 1918, he gave a special performance between two of the highest buildings in Dallas, Texas. During the course of his act, a high wind blew in from the Gulf. Had it been an ordinary performance, the show would have probably been quickly concluded, but now, with literally thousands looking on, with hundreds of dollars in contributions already given, the performance must continue.
It was a tremendous gamble, and William lost. He was blown from his precarious hold, and fell to the street below. He was instantly killed.
In November Madelaine left the game forever, and went home, for the first time since her madcap marriage, eight years before.
The traveling was over. Madelaine and her son settled in Vicksburg, Mississippi. For the first time in his life Earl lived in a house, slept in the same bed every night, completed an entire year of school.
Sunday, March 20, 2016
EARLE REYNOLDS: My dad grew up in a circus - (3rd of 3)
When you start digging for family roots, don't dig too deep.You may do nothing but destroy legends.
Our family legend had it that the girl who was to become my paternal grandmother ran away from a convent to elope with a trapeze artist. The girl, Madelaine Landre, was only sixteen when the circus passed through her Canadian hometown. William Schoene, the man she married, and his brother Frederick comprised an acrobatic troupe, first called The Schoene Brothers Aerial Artists and then, when the (first) world war made all things German unpopular, The Flying Landrys.
A year later they stopped in Des Moines long enough for Madelaine to give birth to their only child, my father Earl Frederick.
That is the legend. I tried to trace the "Flying Landrys." There are a couple of brief references to them in Billboard: "The Landry Brothers work a neat and classy rope acrobatic turn for six minutes, in full stage, which brought the brawny lads one legit." The circus was probably the John T. Wortham Shows, also known as John T. Wortham Carnival.
I tried to trace the encounter with Charlie Chaplin. It is likely the Schoenes and Chaplin did spend a season together. If so, the vaudeville troupe they were with in 1913 would have been the Fred Karno Company (Karno Pantimime Troupe). Chaplin toured the United States and Canada with the Karno Company from 1910-1913.
Dad remembered his parents telling him how Chaplin was about to leave vaudeville to produce a "moving picture" with a child lead and that he offered the part to Earl. In 1913 Earl was three. If, having found his lead, Chaplin had produced The Kid in 1915, Earl would have been five, the age Jackie Coogan was when The Kid actually came out (1921). But the question is moot. Earl's parents turned down the offer because they felt movies were "a fly-by-night scheme" compared to vaudeville.
Chaplin's autobiography indicates he built "The Kid" around Jackie Coogan. There is no evidence he considered any other child for the lead.
I tried to trace the beautiful, scandalous Madelaine Landre and finally held her birth certificate in my hands. "Maude," it read. Not Madelaine. "Born in Prentice, Wisconsin." Not Canada. "Father unknown, mother unknown." Maude may have run away from a convent at 16, although I find no record of the seven years she supposedly spent in one, to join the circus when it passed through her hometown. She was certainly with the circus by the time she turned 17, when she gave birth to Earle.
A friend who had nursed her through her final illness sent me photographs of her, a miserable woman sitting up in a hospital bed beside a dejected Christmas tree.
My mother told me her own memories of Maude, who lived alone, sold Fuller Brush products, and went on periodic drunks. During her visit to meet her son's new wife, Maude attempted to slit her wrists in their kitchen sink. (Was it because she was "losing" her only child, being replaced in his life? Was it because his new wife was Protestant? Who knows.)
I tried to trace the daring William, who, Earle had been told, fell to his death while performing for WWI troops in August,1918. There was no record of a dramatic death in Dallas. It would be quite a gulf wind which could blow a man off a tightrope between two buildings in Dallas. According to public records, William Schoene died of pneumonia in San Angelo on April 7, 1926 and was buried in public ground. William's obituary appeared in the May 8, 1926 issue of Billboard (p. 90). Maude had long since married Louis Reynolds, an electrician, on the condition he would leave the circus.
I miss the legends. I wish they had withstood research. Instead of heroes I am left with very human, hurting people--a woman whose choices or whose son's choices conflicted with her religion and whose guilt (over the divorce? over lying about it?) may have driven her to drink, a man who never quite made the bigtime. Real people.
People I wish I had known.
Our family legend had it that the girl who was to become my paternal grandmother ran away from a convent to elope with a trapeze artist. The girl, Madelaine Landre, was only sixteen when the circus passed through her Canadian hometown. William Schoene, the man she married, and his brother Frederick comprised an acrobatic troupe, first called The Schoene Brothers Aerial Artists and then, when the (first) world war made all things German unpopular, The Flying Landrys.
A year later they stopped in Des Moines long enough for Madelaine to give birth to their only child, my father Earl Frederick.
That is the legend. I tried to trace the "Flying Landrys." There are a couple of brief references to them in Billboard: "The Landry Brothers work a neat and classy rope acrobatic turn for six minutes, in full stage, which brought the brawny lads one legit." The circus was probably the John T. Wortham Shows, also known as John T. Wortham Carnival.
I tried to trace the encounter with Charlie Chaplin. It is likely the Schoenes and Chaplin did spend a season together. If so, the vaudeville troupe they were with in 1913 would have been the Fred Karno Company (Karno Pantimime Troupe). Chaplin toured the United States and Canada with the Karno Company from 1910-1913.
Dad remembered his parents telling him how Chaplin was about to leave vaudeville to produce a "moving picture" with a child lead and that he offered the part to Earl. In 1913 Earl was three. If, having found his lead, Chaplin had produced The Kid in 1915, Earl would have been five, the age Jackie Coogan was when The Kid actually came out (1921). But the question is moot. Earl's parents turned down the offer because they felt movies were "a fly-by-night scheme" compared to vaudeville.
Chaplin's autobiography indicates he built "The Kid" around Jackie Coogan. There is no evidence he considered any other child for the lead.
I tried to trace the beautiful, scandalous Madelaine Landre and finally held her birth certificate in my hands. "Maude," it read. Not Madelaine. "Born in Prentice, Wisconsin." Not Canada. "Father unknown, mother unknown." Maude may have run away from a convent at 16, although I find no record of the seven years she supposedly spent in one, to join the circus when it passed through her hometown. She was certainly with the circus by the time she turned 17, when she gave birth to Earle.A friend who had nursed her through her final illness sent me photographs of her, a miserable woman sitting up in a hospital bed beside a dejected Christmas tree.
My mother told me her own memories of Maude, who lived alone, sold Fuller Brush products, and went on periodic drunks. During her visit to meet her son's new wife, Maude attempted to slit her wrists in their kitchen sink. (Was it because she was "losing" her only child, being replaced in his life? Was it because his new wife was Protestant? Who knows.)
I tried to trace the daring William, who, Earle had been told, fell to his death while performing for WWI troops in August,1918. There was no record of a dramatic death in Dallas. It would be quite a gulf wind which could blow a man off a tightrope between two buildings in Dallas. According to public records, William Schoene died of pneumonia in San Angelo on April 7, 1926 and was buried in public ground. William's obituary appeared in the May 8, 1926 issue of Billboard (p. 90). Maude had long since married Louis Reynolds, an electrician, on the condition he would leave the circus.
I miss the legends. I wish they had withstood research. Instead of heroes I am left with very human, hurting people--a woman whose choices or whose son's choices conflicted with her religion and whose guilt (over the divorce? over lying about it?) may have driven her to drink, a man who never quite made the bigtime. Real people.
People I wish I had known.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
BOOKS I NEVER WROTE: Riding the Third Wave
At Multnomah University (Multnomah School of the Bible back then), we were taught to seek the Giver, not the gifts. I still believe that. We are not to seek experiences. But the experiences we in the third wave* are having as we seek the Giver, worship Him and team with Him in using His gifts in other people's lives are incredible.
Since 1998 I have been part of a prayer ministry at the Center for Prayer Mobilization founded by American Baptist pastor Paul Cox (now with www.aslansplace) in the mountain community of Idyllwild, California. I have found nothing in the Bible to refute the reality and legitimacy of what we have seen God do--in fact, the Gospels and the book of Acts would have us believe they represent the normal Christian life.
Since I began ministering at CPM, I have gone through formal training in spiritual warfare, power encounters, generational deliverance and inner healing with John Wimber, Dr. Neil Anderson, Dr. Charles Kraft, Paul Cox and Tim Price (current director of the Center) plus Restoring Shattered Lives (of DID and SRA survivors, by Dr. Tom and Diane Hawkins) and Theophostic ministry (Dr. Ed M. Smith) as well as learning from books by Cindy Jacobs, Rick Joyner, Frank and Ida Mae Hammond. I have been through Beth Moore's Breaking Free video series--twice. I have served on prayer teams, heading many of them, in nearly 40 intensive ministry weekends at the center.
But when we intercessors come together before a ministry weekend begins, we come with an empty toolbox. Every person we pray for is unique and even if their symptoms are similar, God's healing is custom-designed for each one. We have to depend on Him minute by minute for guidance, listening to Him with one ear and to the hurting person with the other. We seek, as Jesus did, to "go only where we see the Father going, do only what we see the Father doing, say only what we hear the Father saying."
I have noticed when I need it for ministry, God gives me a level of spiritual discernment I do not normally have. The gifts are His, after all, not ours, and He can give them to us for a lifetime--or loan us those we need for a particular occasion.
I've also noticed God's healing is not like man's. When I used to go to psychologists, I would get a "professional hour" (i.e., 50 minutes) of their time and when the hour was up I would have to climb off the operating table in the middle of surgery, exposed, bleeding, raw, and try to stay alive until the same time the following week.
By contrast, when God operates, He almost always does a complete healing in whatever time is available. He won't heal everything in an hour or an afternoon or a weekend--but He will heal and give closure to something, even if we only have ten minutes.
And, as Ed Smith, who founded Theophostic ministry, points out, even when we are learning healing ministry and "trying out" a method for the first time, experimenting with it, God works. He heals. He doesn't experiment.
*The first wave was the Pentecostal movement itself, swelling out of the Azusa Street Revival at the beginning of the 20th century. It had its roots in the holiness movement and revivalism of the 2nd Great Awakening in America during the 19th century. Modern Pentecostals are distinguished by three main doctrines: the baptism of the Holy Spirit following conversion, with the manifestations of speaking in tongues and divine healing.
The second wave was the Charismatic Renewal movement in the 1960s with the movement of the Holy Spirit through such manifestations, producing increased faith, hope and joy in a more intimate relationship with Jesus Christ within Roman Catholic and some mainline Protestant churches. While Charismatics believe in the doctrine of Tongues, they do not place as much of an emphasis on this doctrine as Pentecostals do. In other words, it is possible to receive the baptism and not speak in tongues. Charismatics teach that you can get more of the Holy Spirit by being filled with the Holy Spirit (Ephesians 5:18).
The term "third wave" originated at Fuller Theological Seminary in 1981 under the classroom ministry of John Wimber, founder of the Association of Vineyard Churches. Church-growth specialist C. Peter Wagner first used the term, “Third Wave Movement” in his book "The Third Wave of the Holy Spirit: Encountering the Power of Signs and Wonders Today." Those associated with this movement do not wish to be labeled “Pentecostal” or “charismatic” despite sharing Pentecostal-like experiences and doctrines. They--we--simply wish to be known as evangelicals who are open to the Holy Spirit. Tongues may be part of an individual's experience but are downplayed.
We believe God can and does communicate outside of the Scripture and directly to His children, giving revelation apart from Scripture. All such "revelation" must be tested against written revelation and rejected if it contradicts the Bible.
We also believe in Truth Encounters.
In this book I do not want to dispute doctrine. I just want to share what I watched God do during my first year of this ministry. To God be all the glory.
Since 1998 I have been part of a prayer ministry at the Center for Prayer Mobilization founded by American Baptist pastor Paul Cox (now with www.aslansplace) in the mountain community of Idyllwild, California. I have found nothing in the Bible to refute the reality and legitimacy of what we have seen God do--in fact, the Gospels and the book of Acts would have us believe they represent the normal Christian life.
Since I began ministering at CPM, I have gone through formal training in spiritual warfare, power encounters, generational deliverance and inner healing with John Wimber, Dr. Neil Anderson, Dr. Charles Kraft, Paul Cox and Tim Price (current director of the Center) plus Restoring Shattered Lives (of DID and SRA survivors, by Dr. Tom and Diane Hawkins) and Theophostic ministry (Dr. Ed M. Smith) as well as learning from books by Cindy Jacobs, Rick Joyner, Frank and Ida Mae Hammond. I have been through Beth Moore's Breaking Free video series--twice. I have served on prayer teams, heading many of them, in nearly 40 intensive ministry weekends at the center.
But when we intercessors come together before a ministry weekend begins, we come with an empty toolbox. Every person we pray for is unique and even if their symptoms are similar, God's healing is custom-designed for each one. We have to depend on Him minute by minute for guidance, listening to Him with one ear and to the hurting person with the other. We seek, as Jesus did, to "go only where we see the Father going, do only what we see the Father doing, say only what we hear the Father saying."
I have noticed when I need it for ministry, God gives me a level of spiritual discernment I do not normally have. The gifts are His, after all, not ours, and He can give them to us for a lifetime--or loan us those we need for a particular occasion.
I've also noticed God's healing is not like man's. When I used to go to psychologists, I would get a "professional hour" (i.e., 50 minutes) of their time and when the hour was up I would have to climb off the operating table in the middle of surgery, exposed, bleeding, raw, and try to stay alive until the same time the following week.
By contrast, when God operates, He almost always does a complete healing in whatever time is available. He won't heal everything in an hour or an afternoon or a weekend--but He will heal and give closure to something, even if we only have ten minutes.
And, as Ed Smith, who founded Theophostic ministry, points out, even when we are learning healing ministry and "trying out" a method for the first time, experimenting with it, God works. He heals. He doesn't experiment.
*The first wave was the Pentecostal movement itself, swelling out of the Azusa Street Revival at the beginning of the 20th century. It had its roots in the holiness movement and revivalism of the 2nd Great Awakening in America during the 19th century. Modern Pentecostals are distinguished by three main doctrines: the baptism of the Holy Spirit following conversion, with the manifestations of speaking in tongues and divine healing.
The second wave was the Charismatic Renewal movement in the 1960s with the movement of the Holy Spirit through such manifestations, producing increased faith, hope and joy in a more intimate relationship with Jesus Christ within Roman Catholic and some mainline Protestant churches. While Charismatics believe in the doctrine of Tongues, they do not place as much of an emphasis on this doctrine as Pentecostals do. In other words, it is possible to receive the baptism and not speak in tongues. Charismatics teach that you can get more of the Holy Spirit by being filled with the Holy Spirit (Ephesians 5:18).
The term "third wave" originated at Fuller Theological Seminary in 1981 under the classroom ministry of John Wimber, founder of the Association of Vineyard Churches. Church-growth specialist C. Peter Wagner first used the term, “Third Wave Movement” in his book "The Third Wave of the Holy Spirit: Encountering the Power of Signs and Wonders Today." Those associated with this movement do not wish to be labeled “Pentecostal” or “charismatic” despite sharing Pentecostal-like experiences and doctrines. They--we--simply wish to be known as evangelicals who are open to the Holy Spirit. Tongues may be part of an individual's experience but are downplayed.
We believe God can and does communicate outside of the Scripture and directly to His children, giving revelation apart from Scripture. All such "revelation" must be tested against written revelation and rejected if it contradicts the Bible.
We cite passages in the Old Testament regarding the last days, in which God promises to do "a new thing" (Isaiah 43:19), to give "latter rain" (Deuteronomy 11:13-14) and the gifts of prophecy, dreams and visions spreading to "all mankind: your sons and daughters, old men, young men, male and female servants" along with "signs and wonders." (Joel 2:28-30)
We believe individuals can be demonized; that is, a demon can live within a part of the body. Even a Christian can be demonized. A demon cannot inhabit the spirit of a Christian, but a demon can live in the body of a Christian.
We believe in Power Evangelism and Power Encounters. Jesus and the apostles met the needs of people by healing, casting out demons, and even raising the dead. A Power Encounter happens when the Kingdom of God encounters the Kingdom of Satan. It is here when God shows his power over Satan and gives enslaved people freedom and victory. We believe individuals can be demonized; that is, a demon can live within a part of the body. Even a Christian can be demonized. A demon cannot inhabit the spirit of a Christian, but a demon can live in the body of a Christian.
We also believe in Truth Encounters.
In this book I do not want to dispute doctrine. I just want to share what I watched God do during my first year of this ministry. To God be all the glory.
Today on BONUS FEATURES: PHOENIX MEMORABILIA: My journals
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
FAMILY: My grandfather Sterling
*DETAILS FROM MY BROTHER TIM--ADDED 3-7-2013 (the original account came from my mother): Tim, born five years after the boating accident which took our grandfather's life, was an adult when Dr. I.A. Richards came from England to speak again at the University of Wisconsin--just as he had in 1931 the day before the tragedy. (Surely that day must have been very much on Dr. Richards' mind at the time. It may have been his first trip back since then.)
Tim went to hear him speak. During the Q&A, according to Tim, "I stood up and demanded, 'What happened in that canoe?' I wasn't thinking [about the effect that would have on Richards]. He was taken aback, shaken. He said, 'We'll talk about it afterwards.'"
They did, for about 15 minutes. Tim told him Dr. Leonard was his grandfather. He asked Dr. Richards about that day so many years before. Dr. Richards said a sudden squall came up, the boat capsized, dumping both of them out. Neither one of them could swim. They clung to the canoe, chatting confidently despite the cold weather and water, expecting to be rescued anytime because Sterling knew there were lifeguards on shore assigned to watch the lake for signs of boaters and swimmers in distress.
As it turned out, the lifeguards had gone inside when the weather turned cold and stormy! [Note: That was inexcusable under any circumstances, but for one of their own beloved professors to be suffering for hours out in that storm and to drown because of their negligence was a public scandal afterwards.]
Dr. R. said he saw Sterling lose his grip and start to sink and he instinctively dived down, reaching for him. His hand brushed Sterling's bald head. Dr. R. told Tim, "For a long time I was haunted with bad dreams, dreaming that Sterling was trying to come up and that my hand brushing across his head kept him from being able to."
Dr. R. told Tim he and Sterling had had a productive afternoon together and he believed if Dr. Leonard had survived, they would have "revolutionized English teaching." Tim says Dr. R. seemed more concerned about him (Tim) than the past events and "he reassured me my grandfather was a very important person." END OF TIM'S ADDITION (See end of post for addition from my other brother 3-9-13)
This photo of my grandfather Sterling A. Leonard, who became a professor at the University of Wisconsin, is just here to remind you that you will have no control over what pictures of you or information about you might be made public after your death. You might want to destroy the embarrassing ones now.
My grandfather Sterling Andrus Leonard (Mum's father) was born in National City, California, down by the Mexican border, on April 23, 1888. (Actually his birth certificate says "4-23-18888.") If his parents, Cyreno and Eva (later known as Nana) had not divorced and moved back to the mid-west, my children might have been fourth-generation Californians, which is rare for white people.
Sterling married Minnetta Sammis Leonard, the one whose Uncle John wrote Trust and Obey. Minnetta (long before she became DiggieDee) was an educator who tested and wrote up reviews of new toys for children, shipped to her by their manufacturers. She wrote two books, The Home Educator and Best Toys for Children and Their Selection. Mum said she never wanted for toys to play with in childhood; her mother's evaluation of many of them was based on whether Barbara liked them and how they stood up to her playing with them.
Sterling had a PhD in philosophy from Columbia and was a very popular English teacher at her high school (and at the University of Wisconsin) and he told her she would have to work twice as hard for an "A" in his class as anyone else, so they wouldn't think he was playing favorites. He also had the only musical talent in our family; he played a violin in a string quartet which performed in their home.
He wrote books--wrote some, co-wrote some and edited some. He wrote books like English Composition as a Social Problem, Essential Principles of Teaching Reading and Literature, The Doctrine of Correctness in English Usage, and What Irritates Linguists. He compiled The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays and Poems of the War and of the Peace. He co-edited four volumes of Real Life Stories for children and three volumes of Junior Literature.
(I tried to summarize my grandfather's views of English usage here but I think I got it all wrong so I am replacing what I wrote with a summary just sent me by David Beard, an expert on Sterling's views. See * below.)
In mid-May, 1931, my mother Barbara was very busy with and excited about her upcoming high school graduation, which was to be right after her 16th birthday. She was scarcely aware that a man named I.A. Richards, 38, was coming all the way to Madison from Cambridge University to hear more of her father's theories of English usage. Sterling arranged for Dr. Richards to speak at the University Thursday evening and the next afternoon go canoeing with him on Lake Mendota.
A wind came up, the canoe capsized, no one on shore heard their shouts and after two hours' clinging to the hull, Sterling lost his grip in the cold water and sank. Dr. Richards grabbed for him but there was nothing to grab; Sterling was bald.
Barbara was home alone when the police showed up at her door and stunned her with the news that her father had drowned. Her mother Minnetta never got over the fact that she had had no presentiment that Sterling was in trouble; she had thought the two of them were so close, she would have known.
Sterling was an atheist. I have often wondered whether those two hours in frigid water changed that.
When Richards was rescued, he had hypothermia and was nearly inarticulate with shock. He somehow felt responsible for his mentor's death. Still, he went on to become a famous educator and share his and Sterling's ideas on the New Rhetoric with the world.*
My grandfather's death was the lead story in both The (Madison, WI) Capital Times ("Prof.. S.A. Leonard is Drowned") and the Chicago Daily Tribune ("BOAT UPSETS; EDUCATOR DIES"). The failure of lifeguards on shore to see the overturned canoe and save the two professors became a local scandal, resulting in an investigation. My grandfather's body was recovered after 46 days.
My brothers and I never met Sterling but he left his middle name for Ted (Theodore Andrus Reynolds). I always thought if I'd had a second son I would have named him Jonathan Sterling. Since I didn't, the name is still available, in case anyone else in the family ever needs one.
*Assistant Professor of Writing Studies at the College of Liberal Arts, UM-Duluth, Dr. Beard is writing a paper, I. A. Richards: The Meaning of the New Rhetoric and chapter 2 will be American influence on Richards and the New Rhetoric. This chapter "explores an influence on Richards that is ignored by other scholars: his relationship with American composition scholar Sterling Leonard. Most research effaces the impact of Americans on Richards’ work, focusing instead on the influence of British figures (Leavis, Empson, Eliot, Ogden, and Lewis). Americans are understood as having been influenced by Richards. In fact, Richards read Leonard’s monograph on usage in 18th century rhetorics shortly before delivering his lectures on The Philosophy of Rhetoric. Uncovering Leonard’s influence is an important first step in exploring the impact of American thinkers on the central figure of the New Rhetoric."
Here is Dr. Beard's summary of Leonard's views:
Sterling Leonard's position on usage was among the complex in the 20th century; it's why it's still so powerful, historically, today. His work is divisible into two parts: historical and a survey of contemporary work.
He was a bit of a conservative. He saw how the rules for usage changed over time, and he admitted it was piecemeal. I wouldn't say he was against it, but like any English teacher who suddenly realizes that rules aren't really rules; they are suggestions codified by time and by institutions of higher learning, he was unsettled.
So, in the work that was published posthumously, he set out to survey what real English teachers do. And he found that real English teachers were worse than history -- they marked as errors things that were simply "out of fashion" or ungraceful -- but still grammatically correct. He was especially brutal about issues of diction -- just because a teacher would prefer the word "depot" to "station" when describing where a train stops does not make "station" wrong.
I like to think of Leonard not as someone with a defined opinion (he may have had one, but it's not what I emphasize), but instead as the first person to think that grammar, style and mechanics (under the broad term "usage") was worthy of systematic study at all. Rather than accept rules of grammar, style and mechanics as given from nature or god or the way the brain works, he saw them as historically and socially situated and so an important object of study.
Tim went to hear him speak. During the Q&A, according to Tim, "I stood up and demanded, 'What happened in that canoe?' I wasn't thinking [about the effect that would have on Richards]. He was taken aback, shaken. He said, 'We'll talk about it afterwards.'"
They did, for about 15 minutes. Tim told him Dr. Leonard was his grandfather. He asked Dr. Richards about that day so many years before. Dr. Richards said a sudden squall came up, the boat capsized, dumping both of them out. Neither one of them could swim. They clung to the canoe, chatting confidently despite the cold weather and water, expecting to be rescued anytime because Sterling knew there were lifeguards on shore assigned to watch the lake for signs of boaters and swimmers in distress.
As it turned out, the lifeguards had gone inside when the weather turned cold and stormy! [Note: That was inexcusable under any circumstances, but for one of their own beloved professors to be suffering for hours out in that storm and to drown because of their negligence was a public scandal afterwards.]
Dr. R. said he saw Sterling lose his grip and start to sink and he instinctively dived down, reaching for him. His hand brushed Sterling's bald head. Dr. R. told Tim, "For a long time I was haunted with bad dreams, dreaming that Sterling was trying to come up and that my hand brushing across his head kept him from being able to."
Dr. R. told Tim he and Sterling had had a productive afternoon together and he believed if Dr. Leonard had survived, they would have "revolutionized English teaching." Tim says Dr. R. seemed more concerned about him (Tim) than the past events and "he reassured me my grandfather was a very important person." END OF TIM'S ADDITION (See end of post for addition from my other brother 3-9-13)
This photo of my grandfather Sterling A. Leonard, who became a professor at the University of Wisconsin, is just here to remind you that you will have no control over what pictures of you or information about you might be made public after your death. You might want to destroy the embarrassing ones now.
My grandfather Sterling Andrus Leonard (Mum's father) was born in National City, California, down by the Mexican border, on April 23, 1888. (Actually his birth certificate says "4-23-18888.") If his parents, Cyreno and Eva (later known as Nana) had not divorced and moved back to the mid-west, my children might have been fourth-generation Californians, which is rare for white people.
Sterling married Minnetta Sammis Leonard, the one whose Uncle John wrote Trust and Obey. Minnetta (long before she became DiggieDee) was an educator who tested and wrote up reviews of new toys for children, shipped to her by their manufacturers. She wrote two books, The Home Educator and Best Toys for Children and Their Selection. Mum said she never wanted for toys to play with in childhood; her mother's evaluation of many of them was based on whether Barbara liked them and how they stood up to her playing with them.
Sterling had a PhD in philosophy from Columbia and was a very popular English teacher at her high school (and at the University of Wisconsin) and he told her she would have to work twice as hard for an "A" in his class as anyone else, so they wouldn't think he was playing favorites. He also had the only musical talent in our family; he played a violin in a string quartet which performed in their home.He wrote books--wrote some, co-wrote some and edited some. He wrote books like English Composition as a Social Problem, Essential Principles of Teaching Reading and Literature, The Doctrine of Correctness in English Usage, and What Irritates Linguists. He compiled The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays and Poems of the War and of the Peace. He co-edited four volumes of Real Life Stories for children and three volumes of Junior Literature.
(I tried to summarize my grandfather's views of English usage here but I think I got it all wrong so I am replacing what I wrote with a summary just sent me by David Beard, an expert on Sterling's views. See * below.)
In mid-May, 1931, my mother Barbara was very busy with and excited about her upcoming high school graduation, which was to be right after her 16th birthday. She was scarcely aware that a man named I.A. Richards, 38, was coming all the way to Madison from Cambridge University to hear more of her father's theories of English usage. Sterling arranged for Dr. Richards to speak at the University Thursday evening and the next afternoon go canoeing with him on Lake Mendota.
A wind came up, the canoe capsized, no one on shore heard their shouts and after two hours' clinging to the hull, Sterling lost his grip in the cold water and sank. Dr. Richards grabbed for him but there was nothing to grab; Sterling was bald.
Barbara was home alone when the police showed up at her door and stunned her with the news that her father had drowned. Her mother Minnetta never got over the fact that she had had no presentiment that Sterling was in trouble; she had thought the two of them were so close, she would have known.
Sterling was an atheist. I have often wondered whether those two hours in frigid water changed that.
When Richards was rescued, he had hypothermia and was nearly inarticulate with shock. He somehow felt responsible for his mentor's death. Still, he went on to become a famous educator and share his and Sterling's ideas on the New Rhetoric with the world.*
My grandfather's death was the lead story in both The (Madison, WI) Capital Times ("Prof.. S.A. Leonard is Drowned") and the Chicago Daily Tribune ("BOAT UPSETS; EDUCATOR DIES"). The failure of lifeguards on shore to see the overturned canoe and save the two professors became a local scandal, resulting in an investigation. My grandfather's body was recovered after 46 days.
My brothers and I never met Sterling but he left his middle name for Ted (Theodore Andrus Reynolds). I always thought if I'd had a second son I would have named him Jonathan Sterling. Since I didn't, the name is still available, in case anyone else in the family ever needs one.
*Assistant Professor of Writing Studies at the College of Liberal Arts, UM-Duluth, Dr. Beard is writing a paper, I. A. Richards: The Meaning of the New Rhetoric and chapter 2 will be American influence on Richards and the New Rhetoric. This chapter "explores an influence on Richards that is ignored by other scholars: his relationship with American composition scholar Sterling Leonard. Most research effaces the impact of Americans on Richards’ work, focusing instead on the influence of British figures (Leavis, Empson, Eliot, Ogden, and Lewis). Americans are understood as having been influenced by Richards. In fact, Richards read Leonard’s monograph on usage in 18th century rhetorics shortly before delivering his lectures on The Philosophy of Rhetoric. Uncovering Leonard’s influence is an important first step in exploring the impact of American thinkers on the central figure of the New Rhetoric."
Here is Dr. Beard's summary of Leonard's views:
Sterling Leonard's position on usage was among the complex in the 20th century; it's why it's still so powerful, historically, today. His work is divisible into two parts: historical and a survey of contemporary work.
He was a bit of a conservative. He saw how the rules for usage changed over time, and he admitted it was piecemeal. I wouldn't say he was against it, but like any English teacher who suddenly realizes that rules aren't really rules; they are suggestions codified by time and by institutions of higher learning, he was unsettled.
So, in the work that was published posthumously, he set out to survey what real English teachers do. And he found that real English teachers were worse than history -- they marked as errors things that were simply "out of fashion" or ungraceful -- but still grammatically correct. He was especially brutal about issues of diction -- just because a teacher would prefer the word "depot" to "station" when describing where a train stops does not make "station" wrong.
I like to think of Leonard not as someone with a defined opinion (he may have had one, but it's not what I emphasize), but instead as the first person to think that grammar, style and mechanics (under the broad term "usage") was worthy of systematic study at all. Rather than accept rules of grammar, style and mechanics as given from nature or god or the way the brain works, he saw them as historically and socially situated and so an important object of study.
Also see: "Sterling Leonard was the foremost investigator into usage in the first half of the 20th century Everything rhetoricians think they know about usage (including Richards' thoughts on the topic) derive from Leonard, who did both historical and contemporary linguistic research."
From my brother Ted Reynolds, 3-9-2013: I have a little bit to add about Grandfather Sterling, as I remember Diggeedee (Minetta) telling me one of the last times I saw her.
From my brother Ted Reynolds, 3-9-2013: I have a little bit to add about Grandfather Sterling, as I remember Diggeedee (Minetta) telling me one of the last times I saw her.
As I remember (important caveat)
she said that one of Sterling's central linguistic points was that
languages change, and that grammar should not be viewed as laying down
what the language should be, or what was correct or incorrect, but rather like a snapshot of how it actually is used at a given time (or among a given population, perhaps.)
She pointed out specifically that he said the "rules" of not splitting
an infinitive, of not ending a sentence with a preposition, or of
differentiating between "who" and "whom" were attempts to codify what
had once been used naturally, but that these had ceased to be common
usage; that the living language as used should take precedence over what
had once been considered proper but was no longer the actual usage of
people in general; and that English professors were inflicting
unnecessary agony on generations of school children by their arbitrary
insistence on outdated usages. (Though Minetta did not use the word "anal", I could tell she wanted to.) He was hoping to help change this through his writings and teachings.
Sunday, July 11, 2010
KIDS: Great Expectations
It was incredible to me that the nurses at the hospital where our first child was born laid that baby in my arms and let me walk out the door with him. I'd walked into the hospital fat, unable to roll over in bed without physically carrying my stomach with me; I came out thin and able to sleep on my stomach again. As if that weren't special enough, they let us keep a tiny, brand-new human being for our very own--and we didn't even need a permit.
I thought I knew this human being. I'd toted him around with me for nine months and I not only knew him intimately, I had his whole life planned out for him. I knew his personality and what foods he liked and what colors and what games and what toys. I had his wife pretty well settled on. I would have said I didn't know who she would be but deep inside I must have--because it always astonished me when I found out I was wrong.
The next 20 years consisted of unlearning all that. Growing up, I found out, means constantly surprising us parents with who our child is--in contrast to who we expected him to be. It is the unfolding of reality to correct suppositions and assumptions.
His first tentative reaching for a toy convinced us he would be right-handed. We were wrong. He showed an early interest in taking things apart and in playing with toy cars and trucks, but he turned out not a bit mechanically-inclined. Just last week he told us his transmission was going out and he needed to shop for a new car to get to work. Turned out he needed $5 worth of transmission fluid.
It was because he did so little at first, contracting all over in pleasure when we bent over him or batting spasmodically at the mobile above his head, that our imaginations could invest so much into the vacuum. Growing up would be disengaging, one by one, those attitudes and interests and dreams we had projected into his mind. It wasn't until I made a chocolate cake for Ben's 7th birthday that I found out he doesn't like chocolate. I hadn't been listening because I thought I already knew.
Not that we were disappointed in him. Not at all. We liked who it turned out he really was.
But our biggest assumption was that there there would be equal and mutual respect, response and rewards, right from the beginning. We had given him life, sustenance and constant attention to the point of worship--and he, in turn, would smile for Grandma, stay sweet-smelling through nursery and go to sleep when we put him to bed. Right?
Except nobody told him there were rules. Sometimes he threw up on Grandma, wet through everything we'd brought to the nursery to change him into and stayed up crying past our bedtime. Where was the gratitude? Where was the justice?
We want them to perform, like trick dogs. We want them to be seen as clever, so we will seem clever. Some Christmas he will double up all the relatives in laughter, even the relatives from Seattle who are meeting him for the first time, and we will expand with new worth, because he is ours. On another day, he will stand mute on a stage where he is supposed to deliver three words, as a star or a starfish or an innkeeper--and his failure will be our acute failure, because he is ours. We identify with them as with nothing else we possess--and yet we do not possess them.
They are ours but not by ownership. They are ours by stewardship. Though their achievements and agonies will be ours through their whole lives, we must let the credit or the blame, increasingly, be theirs. We must at least break free and be ourselves. We cannot live their lives for them.
So we give them life and love and food and tenderness and train them up in the way they should go. If we're lucky, they won't throw up on us. And if we let them, they may rise up and call us blessed.
Which we will, in fact, be.
Until then, respites and rewards won't come on cue. He will sleep through the visit to the neighbors whom you wanted desperately to have see him sparkle with delighted coos and grins. He will require you to leave a movie you've waited all year to see. No bigger than a six-pack, he can draw like gravity every woman in a room, create longing or envy in the unmarried, pain in the infertile, gratitude in the menopausal ("Glad it's not me"). He can irritate every single patron of a restaurant or airplane and never know his own power.
After you try all weekend to make him repeat his first syllables, he will finally cooperate and say "Daddy" when Daddy has flown to Denver for the week. He will thrill your heart with the word "Mommy" and you'll find him talking to the dog.
No, respites and rewards will catch you off guard, when you're least expecting them, when you've given up hoping for them. They will start as one of those moments that freeze the blood in your veins, a cry in the dead of night. You will stumble down a cold passageway to find him looking up at you bright-eyed, not wet, not fussy, not hungry, asking nothing of you. Just wide awake and wriggling with life.
You will pick him up and rock him gently, though you are half-asleep, and the moonlight outside the window will play peekaboo with you both through the trees. His downy head will be smooth against your cheek and he will fall asleep with his fist in his mouth. You will sit awake and thank God for this most exasperating, unpredictable package and you will try to guess who God is unfolding him to be.
But he will still surprise you.
Someday you may look up at him, dressed in a tuxedo, next to a girl blushing in pink gauze and wonder, Can this be the bald, toothless kid who used to gum my arm?
You will see him again as the little kid swinging a lunchbox as he comes up the sidewalk from the first day of kindergarten, a note from his teacher pinned to the front of his striped shirt. This is the boy who demonstrated on a Christian TV show how he assembled a robot from an erector set. This is the kid who wrote a letter to the "Tuth Fare" (now framed on your kitchen wall), because he had lost his "tuth" and was afraid he wouldn't be compensated for it.
This is the 14-year old whose "knock-knock" jokes and shrill whistle nearly drove you to distraction. This is the absent-minded, exasperating, inquisitive, marvelous little being who took your presence and your love for granted--and then, out of nowhere, reached up to give you a hug and whisper, "I wouldn't trade you for a million diamonds."
You stand on tiptoe now to kiss his jaw and you whisper, "I wouldn't trade you for a million diamonds."
And he says, "Mom, please, you're embarrassing me!"
I thought I knew this human being. I'd toted him around with me for nine months and I not only knew him intimately, I had his whole life planned out for him. I knew his personality and what foods he liked and what colors and what games and what toys. I had his wife pretty well settled on. I would have said I didn't know who she would be but deep inside I must have--because it always astonished me when I found out I was wrong.
The next 20 years consisted of unlearning all that. Growing up, I found out, means constantly surprising us parents with who our child is--in contrast to who we expected him to be. It is the unfolding of reality to correct suppositions and assumptions.
His first tentative reaching for a toy convinced us he would be right-handed. We were wrong. He showed an early interest in taking things apart and in playing with toy cars and trucks, but he turned out not a bit mechanically-inclined. Just last week he told us his transmission was going out and he needed to shop for a new car to get to work. Turned out he needed $5 worth of transmission fluid.
It was because he did so little at first, contracting all over in pleasure when we bent over him or batting spasmodically at the mobile above his head, that our imaginations could invest so much into the vacuum. Growing up would be disengaging, one by one, those attitudes and interests and dreams we had projected into his mind. It wasn't until I made a chocolate cake for Ben's 7th birthday that I found out he doesn't like chocolate. I hadn't been listening because I thought I already knew.
Not that we were disappointed in him. Not at all. We liked who it turned out he really was.
But our biggest assumption was that there there would be equal and mutual respect, response and rewards, right from the beginning. We had given him life, sustenance and constant attention to the point of worship--and he, in turn, would smile for Grandma, stay sweet-smelling through nursery and go to sleep when we put him to bed. Right?
Except nobody told him there were rules. Sometimes he threw up on Grandma, wet through everything we'd brought to the nursery to change him into and stayed up crying past our bedtime. Where was the gratitude? Where was the justice?
We want them to perform, like trick dogs. We want them to be seen as clever, so we will seem clever. Some Christmas he will double up all the relatives in laughter, even the relatives from Seattle who are meeting him for the first time, and we will expand with new worth, because he is ours. On another day, he will stand mute on a stage where he is supposed to deliver three words, as a star or a starfish or an innkeeper--and his failure will be our acute failure, because he is ours. We identify with them as with nothing else we possess--and yet we do not possess them.
They are ours but not by ownership. They are ours by stewardship. Though their achievements and agonies will be ours through their whole lives, we must let the credit or the blame, increasingly, be theirs. We must at least break free and be ourselves. We cannot live their lives for them.
So we give them life and love and food and tenderness and train them up in the way they should go. If we're lucky, they won't throw up on us. And if we let them, they may rise up and call us blessed.
Which we will, in fact, be.
Until then, respites and rewards won't come on cue. He will sleep through the visit to the neighbors whom you wanted desperately to have see him sparkle with delighted coos and grins. He will require you to leave a movie you've waited all year to see. No bigger than a six-pack, he can draw like gravity every woman in a room, create longing or envy in the unmarried, pain in the infertile, gratitude in the menopausal ("Glad it's not me"). He can irritate every single patron of a restaurant or airplane and never know his own power.
After you try all weekend to make him repeat his first syllables, he will finally cooperate and say "Daddy" when Daddy has flown to Denver for the week. He will thrill your heart with the word "Mommy" and you'll find him talking to the dog.
No, respites and rewards will catch you off guard, when you're least expecting them, when you've given up hoping for them. They will start as one of those moments that freeze the blood in your veins, a cry in the dead of night. You will stumble down a cold passageway to find him looking up at you bright-eyed, not wet, not fussy, not hungry, asking nothing of you. Just wide awake and wriggling with life.
You will pick him up and rock him gently, though you are half-asleep, and the moonlight outside the window will play peekaboo with you both through the trees. His downy head will be smooth against your cheek and he will fall asleep with his fist in his mouth. You will sit awake and thank God for this most exasperating, unpredictable package and you will try to guess who God is unfolding him to be.
But he will still surprise you.
Someday you may look up at him, dressed in a tuxedo, next to a girl blushing in pink gauze and wonder, Can this be the bald, toothless kid who used to gum my arm?
You will see him again as the little kid swinging a lunchbox as he comes up the sidewalk from the first day of kindergarten, a note from his teacher pinned to the front of his striped shirt. This is the boy who demonstrated on a Christian TV show how he assembled a robot from an erector set. This is the kid who wrote a letter to the "Tuth Fare" (now framed on your kitchen wall), because he had lost his "tuth" and was afraid he wouldn't be compensated for it.
This is the 14-year old whose "knock-knock" jokes and shrill whistle nearly drove you to distraction. This is the absent-minded, exasperating, inquisitive, marvelous little being who took your presence and your love for granted--and then, out of nowhere, reached up to give you a hug and whisper, "I wouldn't trade you for a million diamonds."
You stand on tiptoe now to kiss his jaw and you whisper, "I wouldn't trade you for a million diamonds."
And he says, "Mom, please, you're embarrassing me!"
Monday, June 21, 2010
FAMILY: DiggieDee
Why, you ask, did we call my mother's mother DiggieDee? (You won't know to ask that if you haven't been reading the FAMILY posts.)
When my brother Tim was not-yet-two, Daddy and Mummy took him to the zoo. He went from cage to cage, and like Adam, he named all the animals. But Adam wasn't a toddler at the time and wasn't restricted to just two choices--or at least he had a bigger imagination than Tim did. As he trotted along, Tim contentedly acknowledged each animal as belonging to one or the other of the two species he knew, Kitty and Doggy. Lions and tigers were Kitty. Wolves and hyenas and bears were Doggy.
Then he found himself looking at a monkey. Before he could quite decide which camp monkeys belonged in, he saw an elephant. He was floundering, at a loss for categories. Sea lions. Beavers. Giraffes. Alligators. The unexpected complexity of the animal kingdom overwhelmed and blew his circuits.
All he could do was helplessly scramble the two words into one and start calling everything Diggy. Now instead of two descriptive nouns to work with, he only had one. He used it for everything. Mum, in Ohio, wrote her mother in Wisconsin that Tim's vocabulary was frozen. Locked. Constipated. Well, she didn't put it that way.
Minnetta thought it cute. She came to visit sometime later, leaned over Timmy's crib and crooned, "How's my little diggy-diggy?"
Well, the word stuck--but not to him. To her.
We always called her DiggyDee. Sometimes I spell it that way and sometimes I spell it DiggieDee. I can't decide which way I like best.
By the time Timmy turned three, Mum had despaired of his ever coming out of his funk and talking at all. But one day Daddy went off to work and at some point in the morning Timmy pointed to an object and said its correct name. Chair or table or lamp. Mum said, "Yes, Timmy, chair! Yes, YES!" He pointed at something else and labeled it correctly. With each success and Mum's accompanying excitement, Timmy got excited, too.
By the time Dad came home from work that evening, Tim was conversing in sentences. And he has ever since.
Speaking of having two descriptive words, two words always come to mind when I remember DiggyDee. Cheerful and bustling. When we sailed the Phoenix to Honolulu, she was on the dock to greet us. She believed we were all right even though the newspapers said the Phoenix was lost.
When we reached Bali, she was there and she helped nurse me back to health when I developed scarlet fever after the harvest festival scare. Then she went on around the world by herself, by plane and river boat and I don't know what all, through Nepal and Tibet and Israel, causing a sensation everywhere with her white hair. She went home to her women's group in Madison, describing her travels and showing slides of ours and was accorded the status of a Wisconsonian Marco Polo.
And when our trip around the world was interrupted by our protest voyage to the nuclear test zone in the Pacific and Dad was arrested and flown back to Honolulu for trial (I went with him) and Mum had to help Ted and Nick sail the Phoenix back to Hawaii, Minnetta flew out to make a home for Dad and me. We rented an apartment on Kapahulu Street, about a block from Waikiki. At that time it was one of the cheaper places to live or we couldn't have afforded it.
DiggyDee set about her cheerful bustling. Mum, Ted and Nick were gone over two months, during which time we were totally out of contact with them. But DiggyDee made breakfast for me and sent me off to high school with a lunch (I rode to school with Dodo and Rere Tai, who lived next door. They were the oldest daughters of seven kids, named (really!) Dodo, Rere, Mimi, Fafa, Soso, Lala, Titi, Octavia (or was it Uranium?) and Satellite. The last two were boys so maybe there was an Octavia and a Uranium.)
I had to take home ec. and in home ec. I had to make a dress. What a disaster. I used some pink material (substance) that was thready or loopy on the top (like brocade) and kind of stretchy on the back, like foam rubber. Every stitch I had to pull out (and I had to pull out a lot of stitches) gouged little holes out of the back. I had to use a sewing machine. It would have been easier and taken no longer, because of all the undoing, if I had made it by hand. I knew how to do that. Susie Harris, the daughter of an American family we met in Jakarta, had taught me how to sew very neatly while I was recuperating from scarlet fever. My fingers and toes were peeling by then and I'd put the peelings in one of their ash-trays, I cringe to remember. They were very gracious (the Harrises, not the shredded skin) and never said anything about it, at least to me.
When it came time to sew the three-quarter sleeves (with a flare at the end) together, I sewed the entire length of one sleeve to the side of the dress. By the time I finished putting stitches in and pulling them out and putting them in again, I was heartily sick of that dress. I don't know what grade I got on it but I never wore it.
Then we had to make a skirt (or maybe the skirt came first). This was a lightweight cotton material with little flowers scattered over it. It was pretty billowy, so first I had to sew along what would become the top of it and then pull the thread so the material gathered at the waist, being sure, of course, to stop and tie it off when it would fit around me. Then I made a waist band to finish off the top. For some reason the length was uneven all the way around, even though I could have sworn it was even until I gathered the top together. It took hours to measure the length every inch or so, making it even by pulling up a little excess here and a lot there and stuffing it under the waistband, securing it with stitches so the cause of the unevenness would all be hidden. I was pretty proud of my ingenuity.
(I sure hope you can picture this. I stop typing every few seconds to peer around my computer at Jerry, who is at his computer, making gestures with both hands and asking him what they mean."Like those ruffley-things along that bar above you," I say finally. "What is that called?" "A valence?" "No, I mean, what is it called when there's a straight piece of cloth and then you pull the top together like this and put--like that ribbon-thing--along it like that?" He doesn't know. Gathers, maybe. I need to have photographs of every step of the process of making the dress, like Pioneer Woman would on her blog, so you wouldn't have to try to picture it.)
All this to say that one day I came home from school and Minnetta showed me how she had "fixed it" for me. I know it was a labor of love and probably took her as long to re-do as it had taken me to do it. The lumps of excess cloth were gone, the cloth was all released and the waistband lay flat and neat. I guess she hadn't noticed that now the various lengths of the skirt would make one seasick.
I never wore that one either.
(The Phoenix and abbreviated crew arrived back safely from the Marshall Islands, by the way. Here are our three generations: Minnetta flanking Barbara and Jessica.)
Sewing, cooking--and keeping plants alive for that matter--remain mysteries to me and that's how I like it.
I guess not being domestic is a trait of Leonard/Reynolds women. Nana's "little pig sausages," pink on one side and burnt on the other, and her lumpy mashed potatoes, were legendary in our home. That was a "Nana dinner" and we wouldn't let Mum make it any other way.
Minnetta was a sweetheart. She had a very real faith in God, not so much spoken as acted out in practical ways. I have her olive wood New Testament "bought personally in Jerusalem Sept. 1956" (much more beautifully crafted than those sold there now) and inscribed to me "in memory of very happy days in Honolulu, 1960." In the flyleaf she has listed her favorite Bible passages: John 14:1-3, 15-19, 15 [sic]-27. Romans 8:28, 8:31-39. Ephesians 3:14-21.
Sterling had been an atheist but the two of them had been so close it was a shock to her to get the news of his death and not have had any sense that something had happened to him. I've always wondered if his view changed any during his two hours in the icy waters of Lake Mendota.
Anyway, Minnetta never remarried. Instead, she poured her life into her daughter and her daughter's interests, even though Earle's jobs and his dream of sailing kept Barbara on other continents most of the time. When I was very little, I remember her visiting us in Ohio. With my brothers already in school, DiggyDee made it her job to protect Mum from my demands on her attention so she could write her books. Always, in our family, writing was sacrosanct. When Dad was home, Mum would protect him from our interruptions so he could write his plays and when DiggyDee visited, she protected Mum from me.
During the two months I lived with her in Honolulu, with Mum gone, DiggyDee demonstrated love for both Dad and me by serving us in basic ways. She was one of generations of unselfish women in this country who cooked roasts for Sunday dinner--who cooked Sunday dinner period!--and had the whole family sit together around the table to eat it, women who knew how to make pie crust, who ironed their men's shirts. I read a short story by a young man who disparaged his grandmother for holding her hand under a tea bag to catch the drips as she carried it to the trash can. That tidiness, that thoughtfulness, characterized those women.
I have profound and amazed admiration for them. I miss them--but I don't want to be one of them.
My attitude characterizes a new generation of women. Even Mum, to whom kitchen duties were a burden, cooked, canned and made pie crust in our Ohio days. I remember she saved dough to roll out in an uneven circle (with a rolling pin), sprinkled it with cinnamon and sugar, rolled it up (with her hands) into one long roll and sliced it. She spread the "pie crust curls" on a cookie sheet and baked them until they were golden. We kids loved pie crust curls--yet I never once made them for my own children.
I can't make pie crust and I never wanted to bother learning.
That's why that breed of women died out. Because we're--I'm--selfish.
After our trip around the world, Ted and I visited DD in Wisconsin. While I was off with one of my "little friends," as she always called them, DiggyDee took Ted to lunch at a place by a lake. Halfway through the meal, she realized she had taken the chair by a tree which had the view of the water.
She said a distressed "Oh, dear!" and apologized for not giving him the seat with the beautiful view. Ted, with what a British reporter once referred to as his "impeccable American manners," just smiled and said gently, "I've seen a lot of water. What I've been missing is a tree!"
Besides "Oh, dear," her most typical expression was "Bless your heart!" I keep meaning to resurrect that one.)
Tim lived with DiggyDee (he called her Minnetta) for a time while he was attending the University of Wisconsin. He wrote a poem about how economical she was. He said he never appreciated her, just felt critical and superior, letting her fuss over him and wait on him hand and foot--until she was rushed to the hospital. When he went to visit her there, the bed was empty and made up for someone else. She had died of pneumonia.
I always used to say our family never died of anything fatal but I guess pneumonia was fatal in those days. Maybe still can be.
Minetta Florence Sammis was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, on September 22, 1879. (She apparently was the one who added another 'n' to her first name.) She married Sterling Andrus Leonard on December 27, 1913. He died in Lake Mendota, Wisconsin on May 15, 1931 and she died in Madison, Wisconsin on October 15, 1960. She was 81.
"My grandmother Minetta and Charlie Manson
fought all night
over the stump of a withered wiener
and endless cups of tea
she made with water she'd poached eggs in . . .
Finally they called it a draw
but Manson was never the same after that."
--Tim Reynolds
When my brother Tim was not-yet-two, Daddy and Mummy took him to the zoo. He went from cage to cage, and like Adam, he named all the animals. But Adam wasn't a toddler at the time and wasn't restricted to just two choices--or at least he had a bigger imagination than Tim did. As he trotted along, Tim contentedly acknowledged each animal as belonging to one or the other of the two species he knew, Kitty and Doggy. Lions and tigers were Kitty. Wolves and hyenas and bears were Doggy.Then he found himself looking at a monkey. Before he could quite decide which camp monkeys belonged in, he saw an elephant. He was floundering, at a loss for categories. Sea lions. Beavers. Giraffes. Alligators. The unexpected complexity of the animal kingdom overwhelmed and blew his circuits.
All he could do was helplessly scramble the two words into one and start calling everything Diggy. Now instead of two descriptive nouns to work with, he only had one. He used it for everything. Mum, in Ohio, wrote her mother in Wisconsin that Tim's vocabulary was frozen. Locked. Constipated. Well, she didn't put it that way.
Minnetta thought it cute. She came to visit sometime later, leaned over Timmy's crib and crooned, "How's my little diggy-diggy?"
Well, the word stuck--but not to him. To her.
We always called her DiggyDee. Sometimes I spell it that way and sometimes I spell it DiggieDee. I can't decide which way I like best.
By the time Timmy turned three, Mum had despaired of his ever coming out of his funk and talking at all. But one day Daddy went off to work and at some point in the morning Timmy pointed to an object and said its correct name. Chair or table or lamp. Mum said, "Yes, Timmy, chair! Yes, YES!" He pointed at something else and labeled it correctly. With each success and Mum's accompanying excitement, Timmy got excited, too.
By the time Dad came home from work that evening, Tim was conversing in sentences. And he has ever since.
And when our trip around the world was interrupted by our protest voyage to the nuclear test zone in the Pacific and Dad was arrested and flown back to Honolulu for trial (I went with him) and Mum had to help Ted and Nick sail the Phoenix back to Hawaii, Minnetta flew out to make a home for Dad and me. We rented an apartment on Kapahulu Street, about a block from Waikiki. At that time it was one of the cheaper places to live or we couldn't have afforded it.
DiggyDee set about her cheerful bustling. Mum, Ted and Nick were gone over two months, during which time we were totally out of contact with them. But DiggyDee made breakfast for me and sent me off to high school with a lunch (I rode to school with Dodo and Rere Tai, who lived next door. They were the oldest daughters of seven kids, named (really!) Dodo, Rere, Mimi, Fafa, Soso, Lala, Titi, Octavia (or was it Uranium?) and Satellite. The last two were boys so maybe there was an Octavia and a Uranium.)
I had to take home ec. and in home ec. I had to make a dress. What a disaster. I used some pink material (substance) that was thready or loopy on the top (like brocade) and kind of stretchy on the back, like foam rubber. Every stitch I had to pull out (and I had to pull out a lot of stitches) gouged little holes out of the back. I had to use a sewing machine. It would have been easier and taken no longer, because of all the undoing, if I had made it by hand. I knew how to do that. Susie Harris, the daughter of an American family we met in Jakarta, had taught me how to sew very neatly while I was recuperating from scarlet fever. My fingers and toes were peeling by then and I'd put the peelings in one of their ash-trays, I cringe to remember. They were very gracious (the Harrises, not the shredded skin) and never said anything about it, at least to me.
When it came time to sew the three-quarter sleeves (with a flare at the end) together, I sewed the entire length of one sleeve to the side of the dress. By the time I finished putting stitches in and pulling them out and putting them in again, I was heartily sick of that dress. I don't know what grade I got on it but I never wore it.
Then we had to make a skirt (or maybe the skirt came first). This was a lightweight cotton material with little flowers scattered over it. It was pretty billowy, so first I had to sew along what would become the top of it and then pull the thread so the material gathered at the waist, being sure, of course, to stop and tie it off when it would fit around me. Then I made a waist band to finish off the top. For some reason the length was uneven all the way around, even though I could have sworn it was even until I gathered the top together. It took hours to measure the length every inch or so, making it even by pulling up a little excess here and a lot there and stuffing it under the waistband, securing it with stitches so the cause of the unevenness would all be hidden. I was pretty proud of my ingenuity.
(I sure hope you can picture this. I stop typing every few seconds to peer around my computer at Jerry, who is at his computer, making gestures with both hands and asking him what they mean."Like those ruffley-things along that bar above you," I say finally. "What is that called?" "A valence?" "No, I mean, what is it called when there's a straight piece of cloth and then you pull the top together like this and put--like that ribbon-thing--along it like that?" He doesn't know. Gathers, maybe. I need to have photographs of every step of the process of making the dress, like Pioneer Woman would on her blog, so you wouldn't have to try to picture it.)
All this to say that one day I came home from school and Minnetta showed me how she had "fixed it" for me. I know it was a labor of love and probably took her as long to re-do as it had taken me to do it. The lumps of excess cloth were gone, the cloth was all released and the waistband lay flat and neat. I guess she hadn't noticed that now the various lengths of the skirt would make one seasick.
(The Phoenix and abbreviated crew arrived back safely from the Marshall Islands, by the way. Here are our three generations: Minnetta flanking Barbara and Jessica.)
Sewing, cooking--and keeping plants alive for that matter--remain mysteries to me and that's how I like it.
I guess not being domestic is a trait of Leonard/Reynolds women. Nana's "little pig sausages," pink on one side and burnt on the other, and her lumpy mashed potatoes, were legendary in our home. That was a "Nana dinner" and we wouldn't let Mum make it any other way.
Minnetta was a sweetheart. She had a very real faith in God, not so much spoken as acted out in practical ways. I have her olive wood New Testament "bought personally in Jerusalem Sept. 1956" (much more beautifully crafted than those sold there now) and inscribed to me "in memory of very happy days in Honolulu, 1960." In the flyleaf she has listed her favorite Bible passages: John 14:1-3, 15-19, 15 [sic]-27. Romans 8:28, 8:31-39. Ephesians 3:14-21.
Sterling had been an atheist but the two of them had been so close it was a shock to her to get the news of his death and not have had any sense that something had happened to him. I've always wondered if his view changed any during his two hours in the icy waters of Lake Mendota.
Anyway, Minnetta never remarried. Instead, she poured her life into her daughter and her daughter's interests, even though Earle's jobs and his dream of sailing kept Barbara on other continents most of the time. When I was very little, I remember her visiting us in Ohio. With my brothers already in school, DiggyDee made it her job to protect Mum from my demands on her attention so she could write her books. Always, in our family, writing was sacrosanct. When Dad was home, Mum would protect him from our interruptions so he could write his plays and when DiggyDee visited, she protected Mum from me.
During the two months I lived with her in Honolulu, with Mum gone, DiggyDee demonstrated love for both Dad and me by serving us in basic ways. She was one of generations of unselfish women in this country who cooked roasts for Sunday dinner--who cooked Sunday dinner period!--and had the whole family sit together around the table to eat it, women who knew how to make pie crust, who ironed their men's shirts. I read a short story by a young man who disparaged his grandmother for holding her hand under a tea bag to catch the drips as she carried it to the trash can. That tidiness, that thoughtfulness, characterized those women.
I have profound and amazed admiration for them. I miss them--but I don't want to be one of them.
My attitude characterizes a new generation of women. Even Mum, to whom kitchen duties were a burden, cooked, canned and made pie crust in our Ohio days. I remember she saved dough to roll out in an uneven circle (with a rolling pin), sprinkled it with cinnamon and sugar, rolled it up (with her hands) into one long roll and sliced it. She spread the "pie crust curls" on a cookie sheet and baked them until they were golden. We kids loved pie crust curls--yet I never once made them for my own children.
I can't make pie crust and I never wanted to bother learning.
That's why that breed of women died out. Because we're--I'm--selfish.
She said a distressed "Oh, dear!" and apologized for not giving him the seat with the beautiful view. Ted, with what a British reporter once referred to as his "impeccable American manners," just smiled and said gently, "I've seen a lot of water. What I've been missing is a tree!"
Besides "Oh, dear," her most typical expression was "Bless your heart!" I keep meaning to resurrect that one.)
Tim lived with DiggyDee (he called her Minnetta) for a time while he was attending the University of Wisconsin. He wrote a poem about how economical she was. He said he never appreciated her, just felt critical and superior, letting her fuss over him and wait on him hand and foot--until she was rushed to the hospital. When he went to visit her there, the bed was empty and made up for someone else. She had died of pneumonia.
I always used to say our family never died of anything fatal but I guess pneumonia was fatal in those days. Maybe still can be.
Minetta Florence Sammis was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, on September 22, 1879. (She apparently was the one who added another 'n' to her first name.) She married Sterling Andrus Leonard on December 27, 1913. He died in Lake Mendota, Wisconsin on May 15, 1931 and she died in Madison, Wisconsin on October 15, 1960. She was 81.
"My grandmother Minetta and Charlie Manson
fought all night
over the stump of a withered wiener
and endless cups of tea
she made with water she'd poached eggs in . . .
Finally they called it a draw
but Manson was never the same after that."
--Tim Reynolds
Saturday, June 12, 2010
FAMILY: The feminist in my closet
Her first series was "The Wife's Money." Promoting the series, the syndicate sent letters to editors saying, "In your quest for material to interest your women readers, who don't care for war news, could you find any subject more vital to them than 'The Wife's Money'?"
I don't know what my great-grandmother earned, but papers bought the column from the syndicate for $1.50 a week. Her columns are in our family archives (otherwise known as our bedroom closet), pasted onto the pages of ledgers on which someone had kept household accounts. Recycling was one of Nana's salient characteristics--at a time when society considered frugality laudable, and later when it scoffed at frugality as cheap. When Nana wrote letters she saved paper by writing very small from left to right, then rotating the page one-quarter turn, as one would a casserole in the microwave, and writing from left to right across the lines.
With each column was a photograph of Eva, her hair rolled clear of her forehead, her high collar finished off with lace and a brooch. Her half-smile looks almost smug but in her eyes is an impishness and savvy that intrigue me.I have two memories of Nana. I visited her in Madison, Wisconsin when she was 91 and her eyesight was failing. She had had one cataract removed. "That will last me," she said, adding, "Growing old is so interesting. You never know what will wear out next." She would also say, "I want to live until I die!"
She had me thread a needle for her. I was honored, since at six I was used to having other people thread needles for me.
Soon after that, I spent a week with her and my grandmother. While I was there, Nana had a stroke and died. There was a lot of commotion and I ran in and out of the house frightened, the adults too busy to notice.
In her very first column Nana wrote: "Many men feel that women are not producers, that they are supported by the labor of men and that the man should determine what he is willing to contribute to that support. A small percentage of women lead idle lives, their chief thought being dress and amusement, but the womanly woman scorns to be a burden, a clog on the wheel. In a vast majority of homes the wife by her management and labor is a full partner in the business and it is essentially unfair that she should have to ask for a partner's share of the income."
Each day she would, as she put it, "narrate stories drawn from real life, to prove that women should be spared the shame of economic slavery." There are the newlyweds first learning to budget, the couple in financial straits until the husband turns the book-keeping over to his wife, the rich husband who spends an outrageous $23 a month on cigars and, for balance, the wife who charges $35 hats.
There is no question about it. My great-grandmother was a feminist. I don't know why that doesn't bother me, feeling about "feminists" as I do.
I don't think it's just because I'm related to her; I think it's more. It's an attitude she had, a sense of humor, a willingness to compromise. It's her recognizing that a lot of unfairness is unintentional. It's admitting that sometimes it is the woman who is at fault.
It's seeing marriage as teamwork and working outside the marriage as a contribution to that partnership, not a furthering of personal ambition at the family's expense.
"The dearest wish of every woman's heart," Eva has an engaged girl tell her mother, "is to help the man she loves and if she can do it better by working outside the home, why in the name of reason should she not do it? The wife in an office is just a capable little partner, putting her part of the money into the domestic firm instead of doing the housework."
Her solutions are creative. One of her characters gets around a patriarchal husband by spending one of his week-long absences digging up potatoes, picking currants and collecting eggs, selling them, buying cloth and sewing herself the dress he is too miserly to buy her.
Another confronts her husband in his "dental parlors" when she needs money, knowing that he won't refuse her in front of his patients. (She certainly drew that one from real life; she divorced her dentist husband for things like that.)
After the series on money, Nana wrote one on "Glimpses of Married Life" and after that one on "Married Life on $80 a Month." Later, she wrote one about the war.
Published July 27, 1989 Long Beach (CA) Press-Telegram. (Note: Now I consider Nana a Biblical, Proverbs 31 woman.)
Here is Nana reading to my brothers, about the time I was born:
Monday, May 10, 2010
FAMILY: Trust and Obey
to be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey."
My mother's mother called him Uncle John. She adored him.
In November 1891, when she was 12, he wrote her a letter. The letter has been lost but the postmarked envelope survives, with my grandmother's name and address in faded blue type, "Miss Minnetta Sammis, Terre Haute, IND."
In the lower left corner, further directions are added: "Away down South Seventh St. She is the sister of Fannie. I do not know the name or color of her cat, it has six legs two hind ones and forelegs."
The sender is "J. H. Sammis, Grand Haven, Mich."
John Henry Sammis was not only my grandmother's beloved Uncle John. He was the author of "Trust and Obey" and over 100 lesser-known hymns.
"Trust and Obey" was inspired in 1886 when the composer of the music, Daniel B. Towner (1850-1919), was the music leader during one of Dwight L. Moody’s famous revivals. Towner provided the following account :
“Mr. Moody was conducting a series of meetings in Brockton, Massachusetts, and I had the pleasure of singing for him there. One night a young man rose in a testimony meeting and said, ‘I am not quite sure—but I am going to trust, and I am going to obey.’ I jotted that sentence down, and sent it with a little story to the Rev. J. H. Sammis, a Presbyterian minister. He wrote the hymn, and the tune was born.”
My Great-Great Uncle John Sammis was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., and was a successful businessman in Logansport, Ind. Through his work with the YMCA he was called to the ministry, attended McCormick and Lane Seminaries, and was ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1880. After serving congregations in Iowa, Indiana and Minnesota, he joined the faculty of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (now Biola University in La Mirada, California), where he taught Bible and wrote for Biola's magazine, The King's Business.
For years I thought I was the first Christian in my family. After surrendering my life to Christ, I met my first husband at Multnomah Bible College and we both attended Biola for awhile. I was excited to discover a family member had preceded me both in faith and at Biola and that John Sammis was such a committed, enthusiastic, well-grounded Bible teacher there. A eulogy in The King's Business says he was "a walking encyclopedia of the text of the Scriptures. . . loyal to the faith he professed."
I like to believe he prayed for future generations of our family to come to faith in Jesus Christ and that in doing so he indirectly prayed for my grandmother, my mother and me.
On the back of this photo is written in pencil, "The two Johns, 1914." The younger John is apparently a grandson, visiting John and his wife Mary with his big brother Robert. On April 27 that same year, John Sammis wrote to his sister-in-law Ada on Bible Institute of Los Angeles stationery: "John is still with us. My! but he is a jewel. How he could be any nicer and stay a baby in the flesh we do not see. . ." but admits, "My hair is quite snowy since John and Robert came." J.H. Sammis went Home on my mother's 4th birthday, June 12, 1919. Minnetta followed him in 1960 and my mother Barbara in 1990. I am sure all three of them now "in fellowship sweet sit at (Jesus') feet,” enjoying the fruit of having trusted and obeyed.
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
WHO ARE YOU?
I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us — don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.
How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!
--Emily Dickinson
"I yam what I yam and that's all that I yam." --Popeye
Gentle reader,
Who are you? Do you know?
Is your identity dependent on your relationship to someone else? Kevin's mom.
On your relationship to a job? Buyer for Cosco.
To your transportation? The man with the Harley-Davidson.
Are you known for your personality? The woman who is so cheerful or the man who complains all the time. For your ability to fake it? Little Miss Perfect. For your talents, hobbies, preferences, ethnicity? The violinist, the Mormon, the woman with 14 cats. The man with the yellow hat. A fellow classmate in Bible college was known as "the guy with the honey bear" because he bought a squeeze bottle with him to every meal.
When I married Jerry, I overheard someone explain succinctly who "Jerry Renshaw" is: "You know, the guy who married that woman in the wheelchair and she choked on a hot dog and died." It was all true.
We have a friend we could describe equally accurately as "the woman from Croatia," "the woman who bakes all those wonderful pastries," or "the woman bubbling over with excitement about Jesus."
Have you let someone else define you, maybe way back in a classroom or on the playground in elementary school: tub o' lard, beanpole, carrots--remember how Anne of Green Gables seethed over that one? Or in high school: jock, nerd, geek. My first husband Rick had a nickname so humiliating to him he wouldn't share it with me in our 34 years of marriage.
Have you let a diagnosis define you? Bi-polar. Schizophrenic. Terminal.
Is that who you are, a label? Reject. Four eyes. Goody Two Shoes. Diva.
Have you labeled yourself? Dumb. Slow. Loser. Mistake. Too (something)? Too clumsy? Too lazy? Too weak?
What was your unspoken role as a child? Troublemaker? Peacemaker? Lost or invisible one? Scapegoat? Everybody else's garbage dump? As a toddler, I saw my role as "comic relief."
List the labels and nicknames you were given. List the labels and nicknames you gave yourself because of messages you received from the way you were treated, by looks you were given, by the kind of attention you did or didn't get. In the way? Boring? Fun, popular, loved?
Test one at a time. Does it describe who you really are or is it a lie? Cross out the lies and replace them with the truth: I am not a (slur). I am Italian, (Mexican, Japanese, Morrocan).
Which ones are lies that feel true?
Bingo. Those are the ones that are deadly. Pastor (now Dr.) Ed Smith was a counselor at a church in Kentucky who met weekly with a group of women who had been victims of incest. Incest victims often feel ashamed and dirty. When it was A's turn to share her story, the other women, B, C, D, and E, would assure her it wasn't her fault. She had been too little to have caused or attracted the incest. But when it was someone else's turn to talk, they would say (and believe) the same thing, "It must have been my fault. I feel dirty." After a couple of years with them, Ed saw a bit of improvement in their self-esteem and ability to function.
He went home and told the Lord, "What am I doing wrong? I don't see 'a little bit of improvement' in the people You healed. I don't see just tolerable recovery. They didn't just limp away afterward. They walked away." They jumped. They leaped. They danced, even.
Over time, God showed Ed the secret to healing that was complete and would last. Dr. Smith developed this into what he called Theophostic (God's light) ministry. (See www.theophostic.com/) The secret is, Let God do the healing.
Dr. Smith went back to one of the women and asked if he could try something. She gave him permission.
First, he asked, "What are you feeling?'
She said, "Shame, self-hatred, unworthiness."
He suggested, "The feelings are like smoke," he told her. "We're going to have God lead us from the smoke to the fire. Instead of running from these feelings, stir them up. Let yourself feel them. Take them captive as 2 Corinthians 10:5 tells us to do and feel the pain. As you do, we'll ask the Lord to take you to the source of those feelings."
After a minute she described herself, very young, in a setting where she was being violated. She and Dr. Smith had dealt with this many times; she would always curl up in a ball at one end of the couch, sobbing.
This time Dr. Smith asked God to reveal to her the lie she had believed as a result of that experience. She told him the lie she sensed God telling her, "I'm never going to be clean again. I'm contaminated."
Dr. Smith asked the Lord to speak truth to that lie in that event, to that little girl. The woman was silent for a few minutes. Then she looked up and said, "He told me I'm clean."
She could have told herself she was clean and she wouldn't have believed it. Fellow survivors B, C, D, and E could have assured her it wasn't her dirt and she would still have felt she was bad. But when Jesus Christ spoke truth to that lie at the age she was when she internalized it, the woman was healed. She walked free of that lie, permanently. It never controlled or even affected her life again.
WHO ARE YOU? (Part 2)
I spent a lot of my young adulthood on therapists' couches while the therapist and I blindly felt around inside my psyche for the cause of my suicidal depression and self-harm. It saves a lot of time, sometimes years, to recognize that God knows the cause because He was there when the event occurred and can take us right to it, that He knows the lie which the victim believed which is keeping her/m bound and can remove it.
When Jesus frees us, we are free indeed.
I was explaining to a friend about Ed Smith and the principles I was learning from the Theophostic training videos and manual. I shared an illustration about a woman cured of bulimia which started at the age of nine when a friend told her she was fat. She remembered she had made a vow at that moment, "I'll die before I let myself get fat." When she saw the connection and revoked the vow, her bulimia was cured.
As I shared this, my friend made a startled noise. I stopped and looked at her. I had forgotten that she herself was bulimic! She said with amazement, "As you were talking, the Lord showed me the first time I ate for emotional reasons was right after my uncle raped me. I had never seen the connection before!" She realized she had fed her body to get rid of the yucky feelings associated with the abuse. God showed her the lie she had believed (that this would heal those feelings) and replaced the lie with truth. Right then and there!
He did it! I wasn't applying the principles. I was just describing them. And He healed her. It has been three or four years since then and she has never again felt compelled to eat for an emotional reason.
In our home study group, Letting God Speak Truth to the Lies You Believe, one lady told all of us that when she sat in church, she felt unworthy of even being there. "If people really knew me," she said, "they wouldn't want to sit by me."
It wasn't the time or place I would have chosen to address this but she was ready. God took her from the feelings to the memory in the past where a lie was embedded in her belief system. He spoke truth to the lie, just to her, while the rest of us waited and wondered if anything was happening. It was some simple truth, something she already knew but which had never before felt true. Something like, "I love you," or "It's not happening now" or "You are my beautiful daughter."
She got a beatific smile on her face and began to sing! As the group disbanded, she hugged us all and left our house singing and dancing!
Hurray and hallelujah!
I know it's hard to believe but in many cases the "technique" is so simple you can do it yourself. If you're a victim or a therapist, I hope you'll learn to let God do the healing. He heals for good.
You will know the truth and the truth will set you free.
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us — don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.
How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!
--Emily Dickinson
"I yam what I yam and that's all that I yam." --Popeye
Gentle reader,
Who are you? Do you know?
Is your identity dependent on your relationship to someone else? Kevin's mom.
On your relationship to a job? Buyer for Cosco.
To your transportation? The man with the Harley-Davidson.
Are you known for your personality? The woman who is so cheerful or the man who complains all the time. For your ability to fake it? Little Miss Perfect. For your talents, hobbies, preferences, ethnicity? The violinist, the Mormon, the woman with 14 cats. The man with the yellow hat. A fellow classmate in Bible college was known as "the guy with the honey bear" because he bought a squeeze bottle with him to every meal.
When I married Jerry, I overheard someone explain succinctly who "Jerry Renshaw" is: "You know, the guy who married that woman in the wheelchair and she choked on a hot dog and died." It was all true.
We have a friend we could describe equally accurately as "the woman from Croatia," "the woman who bakes all those wonderful pastries," or "the woman bubbling over with excitement about Jesus."
Have you let someone else define you, maybe way back in a classroom or on the playground in elementary school: tub o' lard, beanpole, carrots--remember how Anne of Green Gables seethed over that one? Or in high school: jock, nerd, geek. My first husband Rick had a nickname so humiliating to him he wouldn't share it with me in our 34 years of marriage.
Have you let a diagnosis define you? Bi-polar. Schizophrenic. Terminal.
Is that who you are, a label? Reject. Four eyes. Goody Two Shoes. Diva.
Have you labeled yourself? Dumb. Slow. Loser. Mistake. Too (something)? Too clumsy? Too lazy? Too weak?
What was your unspoken role as a child? Troublemaker? Peacemaker? Lost or invisible one? Scapegoat? Everybody else's garbage dump? As a toddler, I saw my role as "comic relief."
List the labels and nicknames you were given. List the labels and nicknames you gave yourself because of messages you received from the way you were treated, by looks you were given, by the kind of attention you did or didn't get. In the way? Boring? Fun, popular, loved?
Test one at a time. Does it describe who you really are or is it a lie? Cross out the lies and replace them with the truth: I am not a (slur). I am Italian, (Mexican, Japanese, Morrocan).
Which ones are lies that feel true?
Bingo. Those are the ones that are deadly. Pastor (now Dr.) Ed Smith was a counselor at a church in Kentucky who met weekly with a group of women who had been victims of incest. Incest victims often feel ashamed and dirty. When it was A's turn to share her story, the other women, B, C, D, and E, would assure her it wasn't her fault. She had been too little to have caused or attracted the incest. But when it was someone else's turn to talk, they would say (and believe) the same thing, "It must have been my fault. I feel dirty." After a couple of years with them, Ed saw a bit of improvement in their self-esteem and ability to function.
He went home and told the Lord, "What am I doing wrong? I don't see 'a little bit of improvement' in the people You healed. I don't see just tolerable recovery. They didn't just limp away afterward. They walked away." They jumped. They leaped. They danced, even.
Over time, God showed Ed the secret to healing that was complete and would last. Dr. Smith developed this into what he called Theophostic (God's light) ministry. (See www.theophostic.com/) The secret is, Let God do the healing.
Dr. Smith went back to one of the women and asked if he could try something. She gave him permission.
First, he asked, "What are you feeling?'
She said, "Shame, self-hatred, unworthiness."
He suggested, "The feelings are like smoke," he told her. "We're going to have God lead us from the smoke to the fire. Instead of running from these feelings, stir them up. Let yourself feel them. Take them captive as 2 Corinthians 10:5 tells us to do and feel the pain. As you do, we'll ask the Lord to take you to the source of those feelings."
After a minute she described herself, very young, in a setting where she was being violated. She and Dr. Smith had dealt with this many times; she would always curl up in a ball at one end of the couch, sobbing.
This time Dr. Smith asked God to reveal to her the lie she had believed as a result of that experience. She told him the lie she sensed God telling her, "I'm never going to be clean again. I'm contaminated."
Dr. Smith asked the Lord to speak truth to that lie in that event, to that little girl. The woman was silent for a few minutes. Then she looked up and said, "He told me I'm clean."
She could have told herself she was clean and she wouldn't have believed it. Fellow survivors B, C, D, and E could have assured her it wasn't her dirt and she would still have felt she was bad. But when Jesus Christ spoke truth to that lie at the age she was when she internalized it, the woman was healed. She walked free of that lie, permanently. It never controlled or even affected her life again.
WHO ARE YOU? (Part 2)
I spent a lot of my young adulthood on therapists' couches while the therapist and I blindly felt around inside my psyche for the cause of my suicidal depression and self-harm. It saves a lot of time, sometimes years, to recognize that God knows the cause because He was there when the event occurred and can take us right to it, that He knows the lie which the victim believed which is keeping her/m bound and can remove it.
When Jesus frees us, we are free indeed.
I was explaining to a friend about Ed Smith and the principles I was learning from the Theophostic training videos and manual. I shared an illustration about a woman cured of bulimia which started at the age of nine when a friend told her she was fat. She remembered she had made a vow at that moment, "I'll die before I let myself get fat." When she saw the connection and revoked the vow, her bulimia was cured.
As I shared this, my friend made a startled noise. I stopped and looked at her. I had forgotten that she herself was bulimic! She said with amazement, "As you were talking, the Lord showed me the first time I ate for emotional reasons was right after my uncle raped me. I had never seen the connection before!" She realized she had fed her body to get rid of the yucky feelings associated with the abuse. God showed her the lie she had believed (that this would heal those feelings) and replaced the lie with truth. Right then and there!
He did it! I wasn't applying the principles. I was just describing them. And He healed her. It has been three or four years since then and she has never again felt compelled to eat for an emotional reason.
In our home study group, Letting God Speak Truth to the Lies You Believe, one lady told all of us that when she sat in church, she felt unworthy of even being there. "If people really knew me," she said, "they wouldn't want to sit by me."
It wasn't the time or place I would have chosen to address this but she was ready. God took her from the feelings to the memory in the past where a lie was embedded in her belief system. He spoke truth to the lie, just to her, while the rest of us waited and wondered if anything was happening. It was some simple truth, something she already knew but which had never before felt true. Something like, "I love you," or "It's not happening now" or "You are my beautiful daughter."
She got a beatific smile on her face and began to sing! As the group disbanded, she hugged us all and left our house singing and dancing!
Hurray and hallelujah!
I know it's hard to believe but in many cases the "technique" is so simple you can do it yourself. If you're a victim or a therapist, I hope you'll learn to let God do the healing. He heals for good.
You will know the truth and the truth will set you free.
Monday, April 19, 2010
WHO AM I, FEELY?
Gentle Reader,
Before I tell you what God said when I finally asked Him, "Who am I if I'm not a writer?" I want to say that losing my identity as a writer was not the only identity He took from me.
When Eric (Rick) and I married in 1967 and I became a Shaver, I had no idea who I was. (You men probably wouldn't understand.) "Reynolds" was a known quantity. I was part of a family with well-defined edges. We wrote, we read, we sailed, we argued about issues, we loved word-play and had our own in-jokes. We only had to say the punch line: "You must have oinked her into it!" "I'd like you even if you were French or turquoise!" We knew why we called our grandmother "DiggyDee" and why Mum called me "the tragic mouse."
We all wrote. Tim, my hero at 18 when I was ten, had chosen to go back to the States for college instead of going around the world with us. (It had to do with peppermint pudding; if you'd like to hear about that, you'll have to beg me to tell you.) Later he wrote too, wrote seven books of poetry, but he wasn't part of the Phoenix writing projects Skipper (Dad) invented.
On a calm day at sea, Skipper would say something like, "Write a story beginning, 'John Smith is not a common name.'" Then we'd each go off into our own corner (since the yacht was only 50x14 feet, those corners weren't very far apart) and when we all had something on paper we'd come back together, usually over dinner, and read them aloud. Mum would have put the words in the mouth of Pocahontas. Ted would have set his story on another planet. (Almost all his works are science fiction; his first publication was a story, "Just Imagine." The editors of Beyond thought it so good they didn't even mention that the author was only 13.)
We all read, everything from Lewis Carroll to Tolstoy to The Diary of Anne Frank to Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country. (There were always copies of The New Yorker in the head, too. I read every cartoon and could hardly ever figure out what made them funny.) And we talked about what we were reading, holding our place in our own book and interrupting someone else's reading to share it aloud. It was a marvelously stimulating intellectual environment.
I'm not saying Rick's family weren't interesting or didn't have animated discussions on all sorts of topics. They were wonderful people and very gracious to me. But it wasn't the same. They talked about TV shows, none of which I had seen (even the names Barney and Lucy meant nothing to me--are there any other third culture kids out there who can identify?) and when we discussed politics we didn't start from a common given.
We were all Bible-believing Christians but they supported the military and I was a pacifist. I told them I couldn't see Jesus carrying a bayonet. (When I'd stated this in one of my classes at Multnomah Bible College, the teacher had come back with, "Ever read the book of Revelation?") Their enemy was the United Nations and one world government; mine was the military-industrial complex. My parents were secular humanist, edging toward socialism. The Shavers belonged to the John Birch Society so they were not above crusading for a cause they believed in, but that wasn't the same, either.
The first argument Rick and I had was over the graduated income tax.
When Rick and I were visiting his parents in their gated community facing Catalina or (later) on their 280-acre ranch beyond the paved road east of Redding or (even later) their home overlooking Lake Tahoe, relaxed conversations always took place around the kitchen table after breakfast, while we were all still in our robes and slippers. When we discussed social issues, we could get pretty "het up," but nobody talked over each other in their excitement. It was nice and civilized, even when we didn't agree.
I remember one morning we had been discussing a moral issue and we actually all agreed on what needed to be done to make it right and agreed somebody should do it. I left the table all charged with righteous indignation and by lunch I'd written a letter to the editors of a couple of newspapers and in my mind had mobilized a march or sit-in or riot or something. Still in the mindset with which we had parted after breakfast, I presented this to them at lunch and everyone looked at me strangely. I kind of sank into my seat mumbling, "I thought we all agreed something ought to be done so I--never mind."
In that way I was so like my mother. It wasn't that she and I didn't think things through. It's that we just thought them through really fast. And then acted.
That's what Reynoldses did, maybe not all of us that impulsively. Skipper would say, Hey, you know, I've always wanted to build a boat and sail around the world. And we'd do it. Or, Nuclear weapons keep killing people long after a war is over and even the radiation from the testing of nuclear weapons causes an increase in cancer which kills people, so let's do something about it. And we would. We'd sail into the American nuclear testing zone in the Pacific or sail to the USSR in protest.
I am getting WAY off track here. I just meant to say that after being identified as "the little girl who grew up on a boat" and "the 14-year old who sailed with her family into the nuclear test zone," having been written up in newspapers and interviewed for radio and TV all over the world and having two books under my belt, I felt by the time I was walking down the aisle at 23 I'd already lived a couple of lifetimes and I knew exactly who I was.
But who was I as Jessica Shaver?
And who was I if I wasn't a writer?
When I finally brought my question to Him with the puzzled pieces of myself, God answered me as clearly as if I'd heard Him. He said, You are a writer but that is not your primary identity.
"Then what is?"
Child of God.
That day He laid a new foundation. That was many years ago and He's been building on it ever since.
Before I tell you what God said when I finally asked Him, "Who am I if I'm not a writer?" I want to say that losing my identity as a writer was not the only identity He took from me.
When Eric (Rick) and I married in 1967 and I became a Shaver, I had no idea who I was. (You men probably wouldn't understand.) "Reynolds" was a known quantity. I was part of a family with well-defined edges. We wrote, we read, we sailed, we argued about issues, we loved word-play and had our own in-jokes. We only had to say the punch line: "You must have oinked her into it!" "I'd like you even if you were French or turquoise!" We knew why we called our grandmother "DiggyDee" and why Mum called me "the tragic mouse."
We all wrote. Tim, my hero at 18 when I was ten, had chosen to go back to the States for college instead of going around the world with us. (It had to do with peppermint pudding; if you'd like to hear about that, you'll have to beg me to tell you.) Later he wrote too, wrote seven books of poetry, but he wasn't part of the Phoenix writing projects Skipper (Dad) invented.
On a calm day at sea, Skipper would say something like, "Write a story beginning, 'John Smith is not a common name.'" Then we'd each go off into our own corner (since the yacht was only 50x14 feet, those corners weren't very far apart) and when we all had something on paper we'd come back together, usually over dinner, and read them aloud. Mum would have put the words in the mouth of Pocahontas. Ted would have set his story on another planet. (Almost all his works are science fiction; his first publication was a story, "Just Imagine." The editors of Beyond thought it so good they didn't even mention that the author was only 13.)
We all read, everything from Lewis Carroll to Tolstoy to The Diary of Anne Frank to Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country. (There were always copies of The New Yorker in the head, too. I read every cartoon and could hardly ever figure out what made them funny.) And we talked about what we were reading, holding our place in our own book and interrupting someone else's reading to share it aloud. It was a marvelously stimulating intellectual environment.
I'm not saying Rick's family weren't interesting or didn't have animated discussions on all sorts of topics. They were wonderful people and very gracious to me. But it wasn't the same. They talked about TV shows, none of which I had seen (even the names Barney and Lucy meant nothing to me--are there any other third culture kids out there who can identify?) and when we discussed politics we didn't start from a common given.
We were all Bible-believing Christians but they supported the military and I was a pacifist. I told them I couldn't see Jesus carrying a bayonet. (When I'd stated this in one of my classes at Multnomah Bible College, the teacher had come back with, "Ever read the book of Revelation?") Their enemy was the United Nations and one world government; mine was the military-industrial complex. My parents were secular humanist, edging toward socialism. The Shavers belonged to the John Birch Society so they were not above crusading for a cause they believed in, but that wasn't the same, either.
The first argument Rick and I had was over the graduated income tax.
When Rick and I were visiting his parents in their gated community facing Catalina or (later) on their 280-acre ranch beyond the paved road east of Redding or (even later) their home overlooking Lake Tahoe, relaxed conversations always took place around the kitchen table after breakfast, while we were all still in our robes and slippers. When we discussed social issues, we could get pretty "het up," but nobody talked over each other in their excitement. It was nice and civilized, even when we didn't agree.
I remember one morning we had been discussing a moral issue and we actually all agreed on what needed to be done to make it right and agreed somebody should do it. I left the table all charged with righteous indignation and by lunch I'd written a letter to the editors of a couple of newspapers and in my mind had mobilized a march or sit-in or riot or something. Still in the mindset with which we had parted after breakfast, I presented this to them at lunch and everyone looked at me strangely. I kind of sank into my seat mumbling, "I thought we all agreed something ought to be done so I--never mind."
In that way I was so like my mother. It wasn't that she and I didn't think things through. It's that we just thought them through really fast. And then acted.
That's what Reynoldses did, maybe not all of us that impulsively. Skipper would say, Hey, you know, I've always wanted to build a boat and sail around the world. And we'd do it. Or, Nuclear weapons keep killing people long after a war is over and even the radiation from the testing of nuclear weapons causes an increase in cancer which kills people, so let's do something about it. And we would. We'd sail into the American nuclear testing zone in the Pacific or sail to the USSR in protest.
I am getting WAY off track here. I just meant to say that after being identified as "the little girl who grew up on a boat" and "the 14-year old who sailed with her family into the nuclear test zone," having been written up in newspapers and interviewed for radio and TV all over the world and having two books under my belt, I felt by the time I was walking down the aisle at 23 I'd already lived a couple of lifetimes and I knew exactly who I was.
But who was I as Jessica Shaver?
And who was I if I wasn't a writer?
When I finally brought my question to Him with the puzzled pieces of myself, God answered me as clearly as if I'd heard Him. He said, You are a writer but that is not your primary identity.
"Then what is?"
Child of God.
That day He laid a new foundation. That was many years ago and He's been building on it ever since.
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